Man in a coma turns into a murder!
In 2004, Mitch was in his final semester at a college in Louisiana when he met Kayla, another senior. He instantly fell in love with her, and after several months, they became a couple. After graduation, they stayed in Louisiana and moved in together as they started their careers. Two years later, they got married, and Kayla became pregnant. Mitch’s career started to take off, allowing Kayla to stay at home and be a full-time mom. They had another child two years later, and Mitch adored his children.
However, one day, Mitch noticed something strange with a lamp in his TV room. It appeared blurry and upside down. He tried to ignore it but couldn’t shake off the feeling that something was wrong. He became increasingly fixated on the lamp, spending hours watching it morph and change. This obsession led to his physical and mental health deteriorating, and he eventually passed out on the couch.
When Mitch woke up, he found himself lying on a sidewalk near his college in Louisiana. Confused and disoriented, he realized that the past ten years of his life, including his wife, children, and family, were all hallucinations. Mitch had been attacked, resulting in his unconsciousness, and his mind created an alternate reality during that time.
He was brought to the hospital and made a full physical recovery. However, he experienced intense depression and had to undergo therapy to grieve the loss of the family he believed was real but never existed. Mitch struggles to remember what his family looked like, but occasionally, in his dreams, he catches glimpses of his son, forever five years old, trying to communicate with him.
In a separate story, in 2007, Brett Ryan, a 26-year-old man living in Toronto, Canada, appeared charming and friendly on the surface. He volunteered at children’s hospitals and community centers. However, he was struggling with debt and a sense of unfulfilled potential. Rather than working to pay off his debt, Brett turned to robbing banks as a get-rich-quick scheme.
He successfully robbed several banks, using disguises like fake beards to conceal his identity. Brett became known as the “fake bearded bandit” by the media. Due to his lack of a criminal record, the police couldn’t identify him through fingerprints. However, after a series of bank robberies, he was finally caught in the summer of 2008. At his trial, his friends wrote letters of support, highlighting his positive qualities.
The statement of facts said Ryan told his mom he’d been misleading his fiancee, by telling her he’d graduated from the U of T and had a job when in fact he was unemployed and hadn’t completed his degree. He’d been fired from an IT firm in June once his criminal record was discovered. His mother told him to tell his fiancee the truth, and that if he did so she would help him out financially.
“Brett Ryan was worried that if his fiancee discovered the web of lies, she’d call off the wedding,” Justice John McMahon said Friday.
Ryan said he was panicked because Susan had threatened to expose the fact that he was jobless to his fiancee, whom he was planning to wed in September. Ryan committed a string of bank robberies disguised as an elderly man a few years ago, which is how he got the “fake beard bandit” nickname. He ended up serving three years and nine months in jail after a 2009 guilty plea to those crimes.
Ryan planted a crossbow in his mother’s garage and on the day of the murders visited her Scarborough home with the intention of convincing her to keep his secrets. Court documents say the resulting argument became heated, prompting Susan to call Christopher. When the pair went into the garage, Ryan stabbed his mother with a crossbow bolt and strangled her using a piece of nylon. When his brother Christopher showed up, Ryan shot him in the back of the neck with the crossbow, killing him. After positioning the two bodies under tarp in the garage, Ryan’s brother Alexander arrived on the scene. The two brothers fought, and eventually Ryan stabbed him to death with a crossbow bolt. When Leigh, who lived with Susan, came out and saw Ryan standing over Alexander, Ryan tried to kill him too, but he escaped to a neighbour’s and called 911.