Pedophile's Escape a 'Non-Event'
Royal Ottawa defends outings following escapes
By Patti Edgar
Originally published in The Ottawa Citizen, October 5, 2001
Twice in two weeks pedophiles have slipped away from hospital supervisors during community outings in Brockville and Ottawa, prompting concerns about public safety.
Eldon Hardy, 54, fled while he was out to dinner with a supervisor Tuesday. After police issued a Canada-wide warrant, he returned to the Royal Ottawa Hospital Wednesday night.
Hospital staff called it a "non-event" because it ended safely. However a similar incident last month involving another hospital ended in an arrest.
On Sept. 20, Paul Delorme, a 31-year-old Brockville Psychiatric Hospital patient, was on a supervised outing to the mall with three other patients when the group stopped at a coffee shop. Mr. Delorme was charged with sexual assault after a man hiding in the women's washroom of the shop forced a seven-year-old girl into a stall.
Despite both escapes occurring within weeks of each other, Dr. John Bradford, clinical director of forensic psychiatry for the Royal Ottawa Health Care Group, said the public shouldn't be concerned.
"It sounds as though these people had never been in the community and suddenly ran away," he said. "But in both of these cases they had been going into the community for years, supervised."
The men were under hospital care because they had been found not criminally responsible for past crimes due to insanity. That puts them under the jurisdiction of the Ontario Review Board, a five-person panel that reviews the patient each year and sets privileges like community outings and orders treatment programs by the hospitals.
In 1972, Mr. Hardy sexually molested a young boy in a hotel room, according to Ontario Review Board documents. In 1985, while under the care of a Toronto mental-health centre, he was found guilty of sexually assaulting a boy in an apartment and assaulting a boy in a van after promising them jobs.
In 1989, Mr. Delorme was charged with aggravated sexual assault, carrying a weapon for the purpose of committing an offence and forcible confinement.
According to Ontario Review Board records, he has "a long standing interest in raping younger females."
Many of the 180 "not criminally responsible" patients in Ottawa-area hospitals go on supervised or unsupervised outings.
"The law says you have to balance the patient's rights and the safety of the public," said Dr. Bradford. "Treatment and rehabilitation means reintegrating people into the community in a slow, controlled way."
Patients "infrequently" disappear while on community outings and it would be even be difficult to dig up statistics on the topic, he said.
The escapes outraged victim's advocacy groups, who said sex offenders shouldn't be slipping away from supervisors. Treatment programs are important, but so are children, said Debbie McConkey, program co-ordinator of the Lifeline Centre. "Let's be real. Most sex offenders repeat many, many times."
Criminally insane pedophiles shouldn't even be allowed out of hospitals, said Jack McLaughlin, chairman of a law reform group called People for Justice.
"Putting these people back into society is putting children at risk."
