Detective Chris Downer began to squirm in his chair. His role in the events leading to the suicide of a high-school student was unfolding before his eyes on the Canadian television-cop series Blue Murder. And the character based on him was being investigated for manslaughter, for putting too much pressure on a vulnerable boy.
That was the thesis of the episode, to air tonight at 10 on Global Television, and that is the public perception that still hangs over Det. Downer, more than three years after the death of Kenneth AuYeung, who jumped off the Bloor Street Viaduct in December, 1997, at the age of 17.
Mr. AuYeung had played a prank at the St. Michael's Choir School. He and another boy had changed the wording on the director's page of the school yearbook to make reference to a sex-abuse scandal at Maple Leaf Gardens. They had forgotten to delete it.
The principal called in Chris Downer, then a Toronto constable, to speak privately to Mr. AuYeung and several of his friends on the yearbook committee. That happened in the morning. Two hours later, Mr. AuYeung was dead. The events of that day would be played out at an inquest the following spring and Constable Downer's role was front and centre. "He was tough," the principal, John Ryall, said. "He repeatedly asked the boys to own up."
Mr. AuYeung's mother would tell the inquest that the meeting was one of several factors that impelled her son to take his life. A suicide expert from the Clarke Institute of Psychiatry made the same point. Det. Downer does not doubt that he did the right thing.
But the tragedy "just doesn't seem to go away."
The TV show in the end exonerates the officer in the youth's suicide.
"I'm actually relieved," Det. Downer said. "I guess that would be the word for it."
Sean Fine