The Tragic Death of Harry Kierans

A Special Report by Dan Hilborn
Published July 23, 2005


On July 25, 2003, Harry Cawthorpe Daniel Kierans leaped from the 14th-floor window of his apartment in the Edmonds area of Burnaby. Kierans, diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, had been complaining for months about hearing voices urging him to kill himself. Reporter Dan Hilborn spoke to Harry's two sisters about their quest to find some answers about why their brother died despite repeated cries for help.

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When Harry Kierans' wife returned home from playing bingo at about 10:45 p.m. on Friday, July 25, 2003, she knew immediately that something was wrong.

Ambulances and police cars had surrounded the Hall Tower apartment building where the 44-year-old woman lived with her husband. And, while emergency service vehicles were always a common sight in the Edmonds area, Mrs. Kierans knew she had a more serious reason to worry on that night.

Her 51-year-old husband had schizophrenia and, for the past six months, he had been complaining about the voices inside his head - scary voices that had been urging him to kill himself.

Earlier that evening, Harry had asked his wife to call home around 8 p.m., just to check in on him. When his partner of 21 years made that call, the phone just kept ringing.

So, Mrs. Kierans, who suffers from bipolar disorder, left her favourite bingo hall at a North Burnaby church and hopped onto the bus that would carry her on a long and circuitous ride from the Brentwood area back home to Edmonds.

When the police met her at the front doors of the highrise tower at 7272 Kingsway, she heard the bad news that she had been dreading - her husband and the father of her only child was dead after jumping out of the 14th-floor window of the couple's apartment.

"Harry was a good man," his wife told the Burnaby NOW last year. "He was very jolly, he never drank, but he was schizophrenic."

Harry's suicide was first made public on BCTV News on Global, when a camera was invited into the couple's apartment to see the decrepit conditions in which they lived.

At that time, Harry's two sisters - lawyer Kathleen Walker and Catholic nun Sister Mae Kierans - expressed the belief that their brother had died because of a lack of services and a slow-moving provincial government bureaucracy.

"I think the mentally ill are not a high priority for the politicians," said Mae Kierans, a retired psychotherapist and health- care manager based out of the St. Joseph Motherhouse in North Bay, Ont. "When we saw the coroner's report, we saw that it was shallow and inadequate and it dodged the questions."

Over the past 24 months, with the assistance of Jane Dyson, the executive director of the B.C. Coalition for Disabled Persons, Harry's two sisters have filed a series of Freedom of Information (FOI) requests to obtain their brother's personal health records and related B.C. Housing documents. In early March, the family received a 22-centimetre-thick file of documents that they believe sheds light on his repeated pleas for help to the government agencies that were supposed to protect him.

Among the documents they obtained are repeated reports of Harry's threats to commit suicide and repeated complaints from B.C. Housing that the couple would be evicted if they did not do a better job of taking care of their personal hygiene and cleaning up their apartment.

But the family believes the problem started 10 years earlier, when Harry and his wife, two people with diagnosed mental health conditions, were unsafely moved onto the 14th floor of the Hall Tower, a building that has large open windows and where the family believes as many as four other suicides have taken place in the past decade.

"Harry is not the only mentally ill patient to have lived in that dangerous building, and he's not the only tenant to be deprived of important support services," said Mae. "I would like those who suffer from mental illness to have their services restored to an adequate level so they can lead dignified lives.

"My sense is, in British Columbia, those services are being cut back as they get ready for the 2010 Olympics. There's pressure to redivert funds and what it represents to me is it means the death of my brother."

Harry's sisters said the stresses began to build in Harry's life some time after 1999, when the former NDP government cancelled the home support worker who used to help clean the apartment where the two mentally ill adults lived.

Once that home support worker was gone, Harry and his wife began to receive a series of warnings from B.C. Housing, the government agency that operated the highrise where they lived, that they must do a better job of cleaning up after themselves or risk losing their apartment.

The FOI reports also indicate that Harry's hallucinations began to increase in both frequency and severity after August 2002, when he ended up in jail after becoming upset about his inability to attend a family reunion in Ontario.

By January 2003, as the pressures of his hallucinations and the threats of eviction from B.C. Housing increased, Harry formally requested a move out of the highrise apartment, even if it meant living away from his wife. That request was denied due to what B.C. Housing referred to as "tenancy issues."

Mae Kierans believes the refusal to allow Harry to move out of the building was one of the major factors in the suicide.

"The refusal of Harry's request for a transfer, I think, was extremely negligent on the part of the reviewer," Mae said. "I think that was the beginning of the end. The lack of consistent services, the withdrawal of services, it all set the stage for what happened."

Just 10 days before his suicide, Harry met with mental health workers and B.C. Housing staff to discuss the looming threat of eviction and to "expedite a functional assessment" to get support services into the home "as soon as possible."

But it was too late. Harry jumped to his death before his wife could return home from the bingo parlour that Friday night.

Now, almost two years after her brother's death, Mae Kierans believes there is much the B.C. government can do to ensure that other mental health patients receive the treatment, care and services they deserve.

"There were a lot of comments that people (government staff) were sick, off work or didn't have time to respond to every problem," Mae said. "So I get a sense that those front-line staff were run off their feet trying to look after these patients."

Mae is equally disturbed about several memos, written after her brother's suicide, which seem to imply that government staff had no advance warning of Harry's suicidal tendencies.

The South Burnaby mental health office's 'termination assessment,' written on Aug. 28, 2003, stated that Harry had been a client for 20 years and suffered from paranoid schizophrenia and dependent personality traits. That report has conflicting statements about his risk to himself and his suicidal intentions. While one part of the document acknowledges that Harry posed a high risk of suicide, the written summary indicates his decision to end his life came as a surprise.

"Harry had never presented as a risk of self-harm, had never voiced or made any suicidal gestures, but he unexpectedly jumped from the window of his 14th-floor apartment on July 25, 2003. He left no note and had not made any mention of this plan to friends, families or caregivers," said the report. The final line in the report, titled 'response to interventions,' contains the words: "Sadly, Harry suicided in the week before these services were initiated."

Other government documents produced after Harry's death express surprise at his actions.

An e-mail written on Sept. 11, 2003 said that health services and B.C. Housing staff were in favour of relocating the couple to a supportive living situation but the Kierans had "refused this type of living situation before and wanted to remain living independently."

Harry's sister said that report flies in the face of Harry's written request, presented to B.C. Housing just six months earlier, to move by himself into a new home.

A second B.C. Housing e-mail, written on Sept. 12, 2003 in response to media calls, claims a similar lack of knowledge about Harry's state of mind. "At no time during the tenancy was B.C. Housing made aware that the tenant was a suicide risk, nor had B.C. Housing received any complaint that the 14th-floor apartment was a risk to the tenant."

Another document, dated Jan. 16, 2004 and presented as an update to an Oct. 1, 2003 report, was a "confidential issues note" presented to then-health minister Colin Hansen. The paper gives the following summary of the B.C. Coroner's report into Harry's death. "The (coroner's) report contains no recommendations, but it does highlight the serious issues relating to apparent systemic failures in providing care that was appropriate and well-coordinated among agencies, i.e. B.C. Housing, to meet the client's particular needs."

Harry's family still has many unanswered questions.

"I am deeply concerned that the cover-up and buck-passing clearly evident in that (coroner's) report will mean Harry's tragic death is wasted and that there will be more suffering and suicide deaths of persons with disabilities in the care of B.C. government agencies," Mae wrote on March 7. "Documented demands were made of them as if their disabilities did not exist."

The Kierans family's attempts to have a juried inquest into Harry's death were formally rejected in an April 27 letter from the assistant chief deputy coroner of the province. The family is now hoping to take their case to the B.C. Ombudsman.