BURST
KELOWNA — A university janitor with a history of psychosis assured mental health workers he wasn’t having murderous thoughts the day before he savagely beat and killed a campus security guard.
Dante Ognibene-Hebbourn’s parents had spoken to Interior Health and expressed grave concern about their son’s mental state, saying it had been seriously deteriorating and that they believed he needed to be restarted on antipsychotic medication and readmitted to hospital as an involuntary patient.
But when he talked to IH’s crisis response team, Ognibene-Hebbourn denied there was a problem.
“He denied suicidal ideation, self-harm, homicidal ideation, and substance use, and he said that he had no delusional thoughts,” B.C. Supreme Court Judge Heather Holmes said Wednesday at Ognibene-Hebbourn’s sentencing hearing for the manslaughter of Harmandeep Kaur.
Just hours after speaking with the IH crisis response team, in the early morning of Feb. 26, 2022, Ognibene-Hebbourn was at work when he viciously set upon Kaur in a deserted university building. He struck her 21 times, repeatedly kicking her in the face and head, during three separate assaults over 30 minutes, most of which was captured on security footage.
“The killing was brutal and prolonged with Mr. Ognibene-Hebbourn knocking Ms. Kaur to the ground, kicking her, and stomping on her face and head with his full force over 20 times,” the judge said.
The judge accepted a joint submission from Crown David Grabavac and defence Grant Gray that Ognibene-Hebbourn, who confessed to manslaughter, be sentenced to 15 years in federal prison. After credit for time served before his sentencing hearing, the effective sentence is 10 years and three months.
After the sentencing, a cousin of Kaur’s denounced the jail term.
“That’s not a fair sentence,” Amrit Pal Singh told reporters outside the courtroom. “I would think a fair sentence would have been life imprisonment.
“Twenty-one times he assaulted her within the span of a half-hour,” Singh said. “Justice wasn’t served today. Fifteen years is nothing. Ten years from now, he’ll be 34 years old and we don’t know what he will do. There could be another Harmandeep.”
The proximate cause of the attack, court heard, was that Ognibene-Hebbourn had been masturbating and he believed Kaur had seen him during her patrol of the University Centre building and would report him. After he was arrested, Ognibene-Hebbourn also told police Kaur had told him he was a cannibal who ate corpses.
Ognibene-Hebbourn also had an extensive history of mental health issues, psychotic episodes, suicide attempts, heavy drug use, involuntary hospitalizations, and possible schizophrenia, court heard.
Raised in Ontario by his mother, he came to the Kelowna area in the fall of 2021 to live with his father in Lake Country. His father helped him get the job with a firm that provides contracted janitorial services to UBC Okanagan.
After arriving in the Okanagan, Ognibene-Hebbourn was receiving outpatient psychiatric care through Interior Health. He was put on anti-psychosis medication but he asked for permission to stop taking it because he didn’t like the side-effects.
A doctor reduced the dosage then switched Ognibene-Hebbourn to a different medication, and told Ognibene-Hebbourn’s father to “monitor” his son’s condition, the judge said.
At the university, Ognibene-Hebbourn and Kaur appeared to have “a friendly working relationship”, the judge said, making the killing even more shocking and disturbing.
“This court is seeing a significant increase in random offences of serious violence by people in substance-induced psychosis or with disturbed thinking due to long-term substance use,” the judge said. “Offences of this nature cause immediate harm to the victims and their families and friends, but they also reduce the quality of life in the community as a whole leaving all of us in a constant state of distrust and watchfulness.”
Experts who examined Ognibene-Hebbourn after the killing said they believed he was criminally responsible for his actions, but that he likely lacked the capacity to form the specific intent to kill. That’s why the original charge of murder was downgraded to manslaughter.
Ognibene-Hebbourn, who was shoeless and wearing a prison-issued red shirt and pants, did not say anything before he was sentenced at the hearing, for which several of Kaur’s family members had travelled from the Punjab region between Indian and Pakistan.
Ognibene-Hebbourn relayed through his lawyer that if he was a relative of Kaur, he wouldn’t be interested in hearing anything her killer had to say.
As if anticipating public criticism of both the reduced charge and the subsequent jail term, the judge said the sentence was consistent with case law, the particular circumstances of the killing, and the principles of deterrence and denunciation.
Prospects for the successful rehabilitation of the 24-year-old Ognibene-Hebbourn must also be considered, said the judge, who noted he had no criminal record and had pleaded guilty to the killing.
“I am satisfied that reasonable people who understand that our criminal law takes account of the state of mind of the particular offender, and who are aware of the evidence relating to Mr. Ognibene-Hebbourn’s state of mind, will not consider the proposed sentence to reflect a breakdown in the proper functioning of a justice system,” the judge said.
Kaur had come to Canada in 2016 and had hoped to become a paramedic. She was 24 when she was killed.
“She lost her life before she had much of a chance to live it,” the judge said.