e-KNOW editorial

By Ian Cobb

Canada is a wise and compassionate nation.

But sometimes wisdom needs to be questioned and compassion can be wildly mis-guided and our judicial system is proof of that.

In another example of how victims seem to have more rights than those victimized, the person behind one of the most horrific acts of terrifying violence in Canadian history is a free man. He’s been free since Feb. 10. He could be sitting behind you on the bus.

That’s the position the Manitoba Criminal Code Review Board has put every Canadian in as one ‘Will Baker’ resumes his life after leaving the Selkirk Mental Health Centre, about eight years after he entered it as Vince Li, the Portage La Prairie Greyhound Bus decapitator and cannibal.

On Feb. 10 he was granted an absolute discharge with no legal obligations or restrictions to independent living. Go live life son. You are forgiven for beheading and eating parts of 22-year-old Tim McLean on July 30, 2008. We understand you weren’t yourself the night you repeatedly stabbed, beheaded and consumed pieces of a man who did nothing other than be unlucky enough to have you sit beside him on a Greyhound bus.

Our judicial system swallowed your excuse that God’s voice told you that the sleeping McLean was evil and was going to kill you – so you beat him to the punch by slaughtering him. Presiding judge John Scurfield sent you to a high security mental health facility, which you marched out of on May 8, 2015. And now you are completely free to do what ever it is you took away from Tim McLean.

You changed your name to Will Baker and are trying to get on with life, like any normal Canadian.

But you are not normal, Will Baker Vince Li – you are a monster who should have been sentenced to death for acts so vile and evil that an entire province, and perhaps even a nation, continues to be repulsed by the thought of them.

Yet a shrink, or likely a team of them, and a few courts believe you are all better now, a mere nine years after you sat next to Tim McLean on the bus, soon after you boarded it Erickson, Manitoba, chose him to sit next to and calmly began stabbing him in the neck and chest.

As the bus driver slammed the bus onto the shoulder to let the panicking passengers off, you decapitated your victim and held his head aloft for all the terrified passengers to see. After you chased the driver and a couple of brave passengers away, who were trying vainly to save your victim, you locked yourself into the bus and began severing more bits off McLean, who’d be 31 today, maybe married with kids, maybe making something of himself. Who knows. He never had a chance to find out. He died horribly, because free Vince Li Will Baker, you ate parts of your victim. His eyes and a part of his heart were never recovered. His ear, nose and tongue were found in your pockets.

You were eventually taken down by RCMP, showing that great Canadian compassion and wisdom by not shooting you 120 times like their American counterparts would have done.

Along with having murdered a fellow human, you brutally traumatized every soul on that bus and the emergency response people, and you left a mark on every human who heard about the story, which frankly sounds like an urban legend invented by gory teenagers seeking to scare each other around a camp fire.

But this bogeyman is real, and he’s free. He could be seated on the bus beside you, like he was that day he lost his mind and butchered a man.

This monster’s crime keeps on taking, too.

One of the first officers on the scene that evening was Cpl. Ken Barker. He’s no longer with us because he committed suicide, reportedly because he was suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder.

Having to face down someone holding a severed heard and a hunting knife will do that to a person. I am certain the shrink who gave Vince Li Will Baker freeman the all-clear would agree.

Speaking of that person, and the people responsible for stamping Will Baker Vince Li brutal cannibal decapitator’s freedom papers, they should all be held responsible for every action taken by this man now that he is free.

If his pulley slips again and he pin-cushions and beheads some innocent soul on a commuter train or in a movie theatre or busy mall, stating that God spoke shit again, said doctor and members of the judiciary responsible for his release, should be held accountable. Failure is not an option in these cases but failure is the word – in all caps here.

The system failed Tim McLean and his family; it failed the passengers on the bus; it failed Cpl. Barker. It failed all of us.

Perhaps the best test to be used in an instance such as this is to have Will Baker Vince Li live with the doctor who says he is good to go. How secure is that doctor knowing a guy who one day lost his mind and could very well do it again could end up in their own child’s bedroom, standing above them while they sleep, his eyes staring empty and wide… God speaking to him again; his hand squeezing the grip on a hunting knife.

I’m betting that would not happen. “But go free; you’re cured. We’re sure of it,” our judicial system shouts, its fingers crossed behind its back.

Our judicial system might as well have shouted to all Canadians “don’t fall asleep on busses; the bogeyman is back.”

Madness begets madness, clearly. Wisdom and compassion, as in for all Canadians, not just Vince Li / Will Baker, should have applied and this man should be behind bars for the rest of his days.

Once his mind ‘was better’ he could better understand the charges of life imprisonment and, such a concept when in it comes to our current world’s attitudes, be held accountable for his actions. Buh-bye.

But no… no, we gave him day passes and then a full release. Does that sound right to you?

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