Dr. Justin Clark asked Lionel Desmond if he’d ever thought of hurting himself or others when the Afghan war veteran showed up at the St. Martha’s Regional Hospital emergency room on Jan. 1, 2017, at 6:51 p.m.
And Desmond, who’d searched 90 firearms websites earlier that day on his cellphone, said no.
Clark, who’d been an emergency room doctor for six months, observed Desmond to be calm, polite and co-operative.
Before meeting with Desmond he’d checked the 33-year-old’s chart. It said Desmond was on prescriptions for the antidepressant trazodone, common PTSD medication prazosin, the antipsychotic quetiapine and its longer-acting formulation quetiapine xr.
“Those would be the medications I would expect to see from someone with his diagnosis,” Clark testified Monday at the Desmond Fatality Inquiry in Guysborough.
Lack of information
The only other information available to Clark as an emergency room doctor were charts filled out from previous emergency room visits in Nova Scotia. So he didn’t see that Desmond had checked himself into an emergency room in New Brunswick the previous October for mental health issues, that he’d spent months in a facility in Quebec or had a psychiatric assessment done the month before at a private clinic.
He also had no way of checking whether Desmond had access to firearms.
As the visit was after hours, there was not an available social worker to meet with Desmond. Clark referred Desmond to a psychiatrist, who met him an hour later.
“That’s very fast,” said Clark, adding that usually a patient would wait for hours or an entire day before seeing a psychiatrist.
From there Desmond was no longer Clark’s patient.
Dr. Faisal Rahman, the psychiatrist who took over care for Desmond, will testify on Tuesday.
Desmond was released from St. Martha’s on the morning of Jan. 2. He spent the day moving his personal belongings away from the house he lived in with his wife, Shanna, and 10-year-old daughter, Aaliyah, in Upper Big Tracadie.
On Jan. 3, he legally bought a Soviet-era assault rifle at Leaves and Limbs in Antigonish, changed into heavy camouflage clothing and returned to the double-wide mobile home, killing Shanna, Aaliyah and his mother, Brenda.
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