But as her eyes were glued to a police laptop last summer watching a 90-second silent, grainy video of Ryan Hind’s final moments before a security guard shot him in an east-end McDonald’s, the images only conjured more questions.
“The Ryan I saw in that video — that was drugs and alcohol,” Hind, 48, told the Toronto Sun Thursday. “That was not Ryan. That was the demons coming through.”
Ryan Hind, 39, and his friend Donny Ouimette, 25, were shot to death in the fast-food restaurant near Coxwell and Danforth Aves. around 3 a.m. on Feb. 28, 2015, after a night of bar-hopping.
Hind says the video shows the GardaWorld security guard looking at the menu while on break. Then her brother and Ouimette come into frame and Ouimette bodychecks the guard.
Next, a man she believes is her brother grabs the guard and holds him by the throat as another man joins Ouimette in the beating, she said.
As the guard falls to the ground, she says the men continue stomping and punching him. Ouimette gets shot. After circling the guard, who’s now on all fours, her brother attacks him before his body is seen rolling off the guard.
The electrical apprentice on disability leave was pronounced dead at the scene from gunshot wounds to his chest.
And now, nearly a year later, Hind continues to second-guess herself. What could she have done to save her baby brother?
“He started having flashbacks of childhood (sexual) abuse about 15 years ago,” she explained. “He had kind of put things out of his head. He sought medical help time and time again, but it didn’t go away.”
About 10 years ago, he started self-medicating, she said, on top of the medication the doctors had prescribed. And that’s when he started trying to kill himself.
“I think after Donny was shot that was when Ryan realized he was going to (die) to end his pain,” she said.
Hind said she’s reached out to Julian Falconer, the lawyer for Sammy
“When I read that (Const. James Forcillo verdict) story in the paper the other day, that hit me in the face,” she said. “It’s almost like reading about Ryan. The only difference is one is a security guard and one is a police officer. But like Ryan, (Yatim) was dealing with mental illness.”
Yatim, armed with a knife and high on drugs, was shot dead on an empty downtown streetcar on July 27, 2013, after a standoff with police.
Hind, a support staff worker at a Toronto school, wants an inquest into her brother’s death.
In the meantime, she’s written to the security guard, who wasn’t charged.
“It wasn’t his fault,” Brenda said of the guard.
“I told him, ‘Ryan wasn’t trying to hurt you, he was trying to hurt himself.’”
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