||Anthropophagy: “Vince” Wei Guang Li — The Chinese Cannibal Nows Walks Among Us
“A day after finding the mangled and blackened flight data recorder from the Alps crash site in southeastern France, investigators said the box revealed that [German Wings co-pilot Andreas] Lubitz repeatedly accelerated the airliner to hasten its collision course with the mountain. … The revelations came as top French psychiatrist Samuel Lepastier said it was highly likely Lubitz was suffering from schizophrenia given the strong medication he was on – notably Olanzapine, whose side effects can include ‘unusual changes in personality, thoughts or behaviour; hallucinations and suicidal tendencies.’” (Telegraph, April 3, 2015)
Turns out cannibal-killer “Vince” Wei Guang Li is a fan of the antipsychotic drug: “My thinking is becoming normal. I don’t think weird things. I take my medication, Olanzapine, every day. I am glad to take it. I don’t have any weird voices anymore,’ Li said in 2012.” (National Post, February 27, 2014) Of course, Li’s biggest fan, his wildly admiring psychiatrist Steven Kremer, was pressing for greater liberties within months of the creature’s arrival at the secure wing of the Selkirk Manitoba institution, following the NCR [Not Criminally Responsible, the politically correct version of criminally insane] finding. Another of Li’s admirers is Chris Summerville, CEO of the Schizophrenia Society of Canada: “Summerville, who is based in Winnipeg, has worked with Li. He says the 46-year old has done well in care at the Selkirk Mental Health Centre. Li’s psychiatrist, Dr. Steven Kremer, told the review board recently that Li had not had hallucinations in over a year. [A whole year!] On Friday, the review board ruled Li could transfer to a psychiatric centre at a Winnipeg hospital and will be allowed unsupervised visits to the Manitoba capital as long as he carries a cellphone. [Dr. Alexander Simpson, chief of forensic psychiatry at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, a University of Toronto teaching hospital, says] getting people with certain mental health conditions — schizophrenia among them — to religiously take their medication can be a problem. But Simpson says people who have committed a serious crime while in the grips of psychosis are often so horrified by their actions that they are highly motivated to follow a mandated medical regimen. ‘The fact that they’ve harmed somebody seriously or killed somebody and caused other people grave suffering is a thing they can feel immensely bad about and is then a motivator for changing one’s life. And those are issues we work on with people very much.’” (CBC, March 2, 2015)
Unfortunately, records show Li has a history of refusing to take his meds; it’s how he got into trouble in the first place. And he is not entirely “horrified” by his actions: to this day he refuses to believe that he committed an act of cannibalism. In what sense does that suggest he is “cured?” Parts of Tim McLean’s heart and both his eyes were never recovered, not from the crime scene, not from Li’s pockets, where other of his victim’s body parts had been secreted away. Finally, if Li’s medication is still Olanzapine, should innocent bystanders hope he takes it religiously – or not? It always impresses us that Canadian news stories are fleshed out in the foreign press, while the domestic version is curiously sanitized and, well, bloodless. We are grateful to the New York Daily News of October 4, 2014, for filling in some of the gaps; for instance, we did not know that Li was responsible for two deaths: “Mounties arrived in time to witness Li slicing off pieces of the body and eating them. Later, after they snagged the killer while he was trying to escape through a window, they found plastic bags containing body parts, and a piece of an ear, nose and tongue in his pocket. The scene was so horrific that at least one of the first responders never got over it. In July 2014, [Cpl. Ken Barker] took his own life, after sending messages to loved ones saying, ‘I’m too broken to ever be fixed.’
[As for the catalyst,] born in 1968 in Dandong City, China, Li was a premature baby and a fragile child who suffered from developmental delays. He later graduated from college, married, and found work in a factory. In 2001, Li and his wife immigrated to Canada, where he slipped from one menial job to the next. Around 2004, his wife told police, he started to complain of hearing voices. He became increasingly strange as he hopped from city to city in search of work. Police once found him wandering along the road, disoriented, sleep-deprived and hungry. He told them that God had ordered him to ‘follow the sun’ by walking from Toronto to Winnipeg. Instead, he ended up in a psychiatric center but left after a short stay. He refused to follow doctor’s orders. [But this time for sure, right?] In the two years before the murder, Li traveled back and forth to China twice. The last time, in summer of 2008, he stayed only one day before hightailing it back to Canada. [Something is not right here: This peripatetic holder of menial jobs who is losing a tenuous grip on reality manages to scrape together the scratch to travel to China twice on the income provided by a series of jobs swinging a mop and delivering newspapers? (His wife waitressed in Chinese restaurants, but tips aren’t that good. In any event, the couple divorced in 2006).
Despite Li’s worsening mental state, he nevertheless managed to bamboozle us – twice: He arrived on June 11, 2001 and took the citizenship oath Nov. 7, 2006. This man, described as barely functional in English, was admitted as a skilled worker with a supposed job waiting as a computer programmer; he never worked in the field. Was this a case of misrepresentation? Now that the gentleman is essentially a free agent, perhaps the time has come to examine the means by which he finessed entry and citizenship. Must we really be stuck with this cannibal? Every account of the horrors on that bus suggest that Li’s attack on McLean was entirely unprovoked: Does it change the picture to learn that McLean was just a little guy? At 5 foot 4 inches and 130 pounds, he was almost certainly the smallest man on the bus. Remember, Li changed seats to sit beside his victim just prior to the attack.
[This article will appears in the April, 2015 issue of the CANADIAN IMMIGRATION HOTLINE. Published monthly, the CANADIAN IMMIGRATION HOTLINE is available by subscription for $30 per year. You can subscribe by sending a
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