Defeated by his demons, man met violent end on a Moss Park bench
By ANTHONY REINHART
Wednesday, September 7, 2005
Updated at 11:15 AM EDT
Last Tuesday night, Paul Croutch laid down his life, or what little was left of it, safe in the belief that he could handle any threats.
He bedded down on his usual bench in Toronto's Moss Park, which, to his mind, was a darn sight safer than the shelters, with their drunken bullies and bedbugs, their tuberculosis, their thieves.
When the former B.C. resident wound up dead the next day, beaten almost beyond recognition on a rough and desperate patch of the city's downtown, few would have expected police to find $300 in his pocket, right there where he'd put it.
Fewer still would have guessed he had been a newspaper publisher, minor hockey coach, homeowner and the father of a scientist before his demons defeated him.
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And no one who was thinking straight would have anticipated where the finger would point: at three part-time reserve soldiers from the armoury next door, three young men trained to lay down their own lives to save others.
As often as death walks the tired streets around the park, "you wouldn't expect people that are charged with our protection to take this kind of action," said Don Harris, who runs the Good Neighbours' Club, a men's drop-in centre where Mr. Croutch, 59, visited daily.
For all its optimism, the centre's name suggested only irony yesterday, given what police allege to have happened after three members of the Queen's Own Rifles left the Moss Park Armoury and visited the park next door.
There, police say, a woman saw three men beating a homeless man, and they turned on her when she tried to intervene.
There, at 4:40 a.m., officers found an unconscious Mr. Croutch, suffering what the coroner would call "blunt impact head trauma . . . consistent with being punched, kicked or stomped."
And there, they pursued leads, along with the National Investigation Services of the Canadian Forces, that resulted in Jeffery Hall, 21, Mountaz Ibrahim, 23, and Brian Deganis, 21, being charged with second-degree murder and assault causing bodily harm.
In due course, a court will answer the questions. Yesterday, those closest to Mr. Croutch could only wait, wonder and remember.
"Paul wasn't always a crazy homeless person," said Marilyn Howard, his former wife of 25 years, from Dawson Creek. "He was incredibly brilliant, and that was probably a lot of his difficulty."
Difficulty quickly followed Mr. Croutch's birth, in Toronto, on Nov. 6, 1945. He was placed in a foster home with a family called Croutch, but they never adopted him.
At 12, he renamed himself Paul Richard Franklin Croutch, taking his first three names from his favourite hockey players.
When the young couple met in 1966, Mr. Croutch worked for aircraft maker McDonnell Douglas, and after they married, he started his own fabricating business.
"His mental illness was starting even then," Ms. Howard said. "His big problem was, he was always right," and too often saw the rest of the world as wrong.
The couple moved to Vancouver in 1973, then north to Dawson Creek two years later, where Mr. Croutch worked as a travelling auto-parts salesman for Ford. Twice a month, even in winter, his work took him deep into the Yukon via the Alaska Highway, a desolate but essential lifeline for northerners.
"He did lots of favours for people on the highway," Ms. Howard said, recalling how her husband would pick up a half-dozen lobsters on sale at Safeway, or a side of beef from a farmer, and deliver them to far-flung friends along his route.
Mr. Croutch left the road after their daughter, Shannon, was born in 1977. He joined the Peace River Block News as advertising manager, but when its owners cut salaries, he left. With his wife and some friends, he started a weekly, The Mirror, in 1980, and focused his coverage exclusively on good news.
The paper prospered, but Mr. Croutch's mental illness became ever more evident, both at home and in the paranoid tone of his editorials.
"The worse it got, the less he realized how much help he needed," said Ms. Howard.
And he would go on refusing help until the day before his death.
The couple divorced in 1993, and soon after, Mr. Croutch sold The Mirror and moved to Grande Prairie, Alta.
"I got reports of him just sitting in the mall [in Grande Prairie], looking like a zombie," Ms. Howard said.
She lost track of him from there, but in the late 1990s, as his daughter was earning her master's degree in plant science, Mr. Croutch made his way back to Toronto.
When he walked through the stainless steel doors of the Good Neighbours' Club in 1999, he filled out a form to become a member. In the box marked "next of kin," he wrote "none wished."
From then on, he was a fixture, albeit a quiet one, at the drop-in centre, where he showered, did his laundry and sent faxes to the social agencies that helped him.
"He was really smart, and he really felt he'd been wronged," said Gary McCrimmon, a worker at the centre, referring to Mr. Croutch's phantom fears of the RCMP, the government, whoever. "I think it consumed him and it was a large part of his downfall."
As evening fell last Tuesday, Mr. Croutch turned aside a doctor's concerns with his usual phrase: "I'll be dead in a couple days." He also refused, as usual, to sleep in a homeless shelter.
"I gave him two bottles of water and he set off for the park," Mr. McCrimmon said.
When a detective called the centre on Wednesday morning, Mr. McCrimmon answered. When told of Mr. Croutch's death, and of the bruising on his face, his first thought was that he had fallen.
"She said, 'Oh, no, no, this is a homicide,' " he said. "When I went and identified the body, I could see what she meant."
Ms. Howard, who spent yesterday taking condolences on the sidewalks of Dawson Creek and arranging a Toronto cremation by phone, said she hopes to be in court to see her ex-husband's alleged killers face justice.
"Paul's life was over, in many ways, years ago," she said. "These people who did this have got to atone for what they've done."