UMVA has learned that a 47‑year‑old Toronto man, long deemed a public safety concern, vanished on April 2 and was finally located after more than a month of frantic searching.
Police disclosed that the individual, identified as Tesfaye Asefa, disappeared from the Queen St. W.–Ossington Ave. corridor, a stone’s throw from a major mental‑health centre, prompting a city‑wide alert.
Community members rallied, providing tips that proved pivotal; their vigilance helped officers trace his movements and bring him back into custody on Thursday.
Asefa’s history reads like a cautionary saga: eight documented escapes from the same facility over the past several years, each time slipping through the cracks of a system designed to keep him under supervision.
In 2011 he was found not criminally responsible for two sexual assaults, triggering a Form 49 warrant that legally binds him to a provincial psychiatric hospital and imposes strict conditions.
Yet the pattern persisted—first vanishing in August 2018, then again in May 2019, January 2020, June 2020, January 2023, and most recently in July 2025, when he was last sighted near Danforth and Jones Aves.
Each disappearance forced law enforcement to launch intensive searches, often relying on public eyes and ears to locate him before he could pose further danger.
According to information obtained by UMVA, the latest capture underscores both the challenges of managing high‑risk mental‑health patients and the critical role of community cooperation in preventing potential tragedies.
