Carmen Campbell sits nervously in the witness chair as her son watches her carefully from the prisoner’s box, knowing her testimony could help make the difference between being sentenced to prison or a mental hospital.
The mother of Richard Edwin insists he was paranoid and hearing voices, though admits she hadn’t seen her boy for more than two years before “the incident” – when he brazenly opened fire downtown andkilled two random strangerson two frightening days in April 2022.
But she does remember when he mentioned firearms just before the pandemic hit.
“He said he had an application that he wanted me to fill out to get a licence for a gun. And I said, ‘What do you need that for? I’m not going to fill anything out.’ I didn’t hear anything more about that.”
Accused admits killing two innocent victims
Edwin, 43, has admitted gunning downKartik Vasudev, 21, an international student from India, outside Sherbourne subway station on April 7 andElijah EleazarMahepathtwo days later near Sherbourne and Dundasbut argues that he has a history of schizophrenia and should be foundnot criminally responsible due to a mental disorder.
The onus is on Edwin to prove his mental illness made it impossible for him to understand the moral wrongfulness of slaying two innocent men who were simply going about their lives on a spring day.
A forensic psychiatrist, Dr. Lisa Ramshaw, is to testify for the defence next week about why the court should find him NCR while the Crown’s expert will disagree.
First, a shattered mom.
Campbell is a retired Seaton House shelter worker who now splits her time between Canada and Jamaica. She told defence lawyer Kaitlyn Mathews it was when her son was in his 20s that he began to act strangely – he was nervous, agitated and couldn’t sustain his studies at Humber College or hold down a job.
The last she knew, he was selling Muslim newsletters on the street.
Her son was hearing voices
Sometime between 2010 and 2014 – Campbell couldn’t recall exactly when – Edwin told her he was hearing voices. She took him to a medical doctor who could also see his spirit “to see if he had spiritual issues.” She believes her son was given a prescription, perhaps for anti-psychotic medication, but he never filled it.
He later told her he wasn’t hearing the voices anymore.
It wasn’t until after his arrest, Campbell said, that she learned he’d been diagnosed with schizophrenia in 2010 when he was living in Ottawa with his father.
When he was back in Toronto, Edwin had moved in with her for a short time after moving out of his apartment on Sherbourne near Dundas – a neighbourhood he’d later return to for his violent rampage. He then found a place on Spadina Ave.
His mom didn’t like it.
“It was a little dark room in the basement,” Campbell complained. “He had to prepare his meals in the washroom.”
By this time, he was making her nervous and she would wait by the door rather than enter his room.
She last saw her son when they went out for her birthday lunch in January 2020 – she was concerned by his stuttering and staring at people.
“I think he was very paranoid as if somebody is following him,” Campbell recalled. She wouldn’t ask him about it, she explained, because she was afraid it would embarrass him or get him angry.
Campbell left for Jamaica soon after, COVID followed and they’d only exchange one phone call and text before she returned to Canada.
Under questioning from Crown attorney Sandra Duffey, Campbell said she met with Ramshaw in March 2025 and told the psychiatrist that it felt like a “bad spirit” was following her son during that time. But no, he never told her he’d hallucinated and wanted to jump out of a car in 2010 or was preoccupied with white supremacists and had problems with anti-Black racism.
Campbell returned to Canada on April 5, 2022. Edwin texted to see if she’d arrived safely and on April 6, messaged: “Be mindful when on the road mom, a lot of angry drivers now in Canada.”
She agreed with the prosecutor that it was a “normal text from a son looking out for his mother.”
The next day, Edwin drew his handgun and fired multiple shots into the back of his first unsuspecting victim.
