Tirade on COVID Mask Mayhem and Manslaughter Mishandled

No justice for Stephanie Warriner in post-COVID courts

This is my tirade for February 11, 2023

Her name was Stephanie Warriner and she was 43 years old, when she died at the Toronto General Hospital after an altercation with hospital security guards on May 11th of 2020. That was almost three years ago, and yet we are really only hearing the full story about it now. I have searched Google for any news reports of this incident in and around the time it occurred and found nothing. I only came across a few local stories published in December of 2020, noting that the two of the security guards involved in the altercation had been charged with manslaughter and criminal negligence by unlawful confinement/restraint, causing death. 

I am sure many have now read the news reports that Warriner’s family has filed a $16 million lawsuit against the hospital and the five security guards due to the circumstances of her death. Why are they suing? Because the criminal charges against the security guards have been dropped, so the family has no other legal recourse, other than to turn to civil court, to get justice for the mother of five. That story has made headlines, but strangely enough, Warriner’s encounter with the security guards and her subsequent death at the hospital never did. Why is that? Was it because such an incident might have cast an unfavourable light on the madness around mask mandates and the extremes some ‘obsessed’ or ‘possessed’ security forces would go to to enforce them?

It is making news now, in this post-COVID world, where some sanity is finally surfacing amidst three years of COVID chaos and hysteria. It is making news now because a disturbing video has surfaced showing Warriner’s fatal encounter with the five–yes five–overzealous COVID-crazed security guards, who literally manhandled her to death because she was not wearing her COVID mask properly. It is in the news because Ontario Superior Court Justice, Sean Dunphy, dropped the charges against security guards–Amanda Rojas-Silva and Shane Hutley–despite the emergence of the video because, "there was not enough evidence to proceed to trial”. It is making news because Ontario’s Ministry of the Attorney General has decided that the Crown will not appeal the judge’s decision and "has no further comment on the issue”. This situation is finally causing the moral outrage that it should have in the first place. A small vulnerable woman, who struggled wth bi-polar disorder and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), is dead because she wasn’t wearing a useless face mask properly and apparently no one is to blame but her. Where is the justice in that?

At the preliminary hearing both Rojas-Silva and Hutley maintained they only used ‘necessary force’ to gain hold of Warriner, but the video tells very different story. Two security staff who testified against the accused told the court that Rojas-Silva placed the weight of her upper body on Warriner while she was held, chest down. Another guard admitted he falsely claimed Warriner threw the first punch. A forensic pathologist testified that Warriner would still be alive had she not been restrained that day. All of this evidence was under a publication ban, but with the case quashed it can now be made public. Now I am no trial lawyer, or judge, but I have eyes, and if the video and the testimony is not enough to take this case to a jury trial, I don’t know what is. You judge for yourself, here is the scenario and the video.

Warriner was at the hospital because she was experiencing respiratory issues due to her COPD. While there she felt hungry, so she decided to go to the cafeteria to get a sandwich. On her way there she began experiencing shortness of breath, so she took a seat in a nearby chair and pulled her mask down from her face below her chin in order to catch her breath.

It was then—as the video has revealed—that Warriner, while still sitting in the chair, all by herself, is approached by a female guard who begins chastising her for not wearing her mask properly–pointing and gesturing intensely close to Warriner’s face. The video camera is turned away briefly—the guard who turned the camera away says he did so becaused he ‘panicked’. When the camera is turned back on the scene Warriner is seen standing up and trying to walk away when the female guard grabs her and violently pushes her up against the wall as the other guards move in on her. The camera is then turned to a blank wall.

The next scene in the video shows the guards quickly wheeling an unconscious Warriner away on some type of stretcher, her legs limply dangling over the edge of it. She never regained consciousness and died sixteen days later.

Were the security guards so blindly focused on the mask issue that they could not see that Warriner was obviously in respiratory distress and needed help, not the hell they put her through?  Is that what COVID craziness does to people? Makes them so completely oblivious to anything other than a stupid mask that they lose sight their own humanity?

Denise Warriner, the woman’s sister, blames her death on “COVID paranoia and phobia.” She told the Toronto Sun that her sister was wrangled like cattle, “She was pushed against the wall, held down and handcuffed. It was heartless, cruel and unnecessary.” 

The video is not easy to watch, the word disturbing is quite appropriate in describing it.

https://www.cbc.ca/player/play/2160537155717

Can you imagine that? Handcuffed and apprehended like a common criminal for the sin for not wearing her COVID mask properly. Mask mandates, it should be noted, are not, and were never an actual law. There is nothing illegal about not wearing a face mask, but I guess those COVID-crazed security guards hadn’t gotten that memo. 

Did it not occur to them to ask her if she was alright, as it should have been obvious to anyone she was in distress? Did it not occur to them to ask her if she needed a doctor, if she need oxygen, or could they take her back to emergency? It was a hospital after all. If they had asked her what she was doing, rather than giving her a lecture on ‘mask manners’ she might have told them she was on her way to the cafeteria. They might have been able to offer to go and get a sandwich for her while she rested and caught her breath.

In a normal world, in a normal time, these guards might have seen Stephanie, yes, Stephanie—that was her name—somebody’s daughter, somebody’s mother, and somebody’s sister—as a human being in trouble, who needed their help. Instead, they only saw a maskless face. What did this COVID craziness do to these people so that all they could see was a woman ‘breaking’ the rules. Who was she putting in danger? Even in you were stupid enough to believe a mask actually protected anyone, the hallways were empty, she wasn’t sitting close to anyone. The guards had masks and face guards. Where was their bloody humanity. There wasn’t any, because COVID craziness had infected people more than the virus ever did. And for that, this woman paid with her life.

The fact that the guards, and the hospital for that matter, are not being prosecuted for their callouness is unconscionable. But that appears to be the cockeyed justice system in this post-COVID world. Pastors who held church services during COVID lockdowns are still facing prosecution. Some members and organizers of the Freedom Convoy who did nothing but peacefully protest vaccine mandates on the streets of Ottawa, are still facing criminal charges and awaiting trials, while under bail conditions stricter than any accused felon might face. Three men involved in the border blockade in Coutts, Alberta could be facing as much a ten years in prison for, again, peacefully protesting vaccine mandates and lockdowns.

But, the people who killed a woman because she wasn’t wearing a mask, with video evidence clearly demonstrating their brutal treatment of her now surfacing, will never pay for the cruel manner in which they treated a hospital patient—I might add—that lead to her untimely death. Hopefully Stephanie’s family will get some form of justice from the civil suit. But for real justice, Doug Downey, Ontario’s Attorney General needs to start taking some heat for allowng his prosecutors to so quickly back down from a case that has all the grounds needed for an appeal. A woman who didn’t need to die, is dead, and Ontario’s criminal justice system is not holding anyone accountable for this—and that is a crime in of itself.