On the afternoon of Monday, April 23, 2018, ten people were killed and sixteen others were targeted for death in the North York district of Toronto by a 25-year-old man from the suburb of Richmond Hill. Eight of the dead were women and two were men. The man, Alek Minassian, was arrested by Toronto police the same day. He never denied what he had done. When his case came to trial two and a half years later, he admitted that he had planned the killings and carried them out, and that he had meant every death. The only question left for the court was whether he could be held responsible for them.
His lawyers said he could not. They argued that autism spectrum disorder, diagnosed when he was a child, had left him unable to know that what he did was morally wrong. On March 3, 2021, a judge of the Ontario Superior Court of Justice, sitting without a jury, rejected the defense and found him guilty of ten counts of first-degree murder and sixteen counts of attempted murder. In October 2021 one of the women who survived that afternoon died, more than three years after that afternoon, and the court treated her as the eleventh person he had killed. He was sentenced in June 2022 to life imprisonment with no eligibility for parole for twenty-five years. In November 2026 the Court of Appeal for Ontario confirmed that he had abandoned his appeal.
Minassian grew up in Richmond Hill, a suburb on Toronto's northern edge. He was diagnosed in childhood with what was then called a pervasive developmental disorder, the condition now known as autism spectrum disorder; the psychiatrists who examined him for trial gave evidence of that early diagnosis. He was picked on at high school.
In 2017 he joined the Canadian Armed Forces. He lasted sixteen days into recruit training before he asked to leave, and he was released at his own request. The federal defense minister confirmed the brief enlistment the day after the killings. After his arrest, Toronto's police chief said Minassian had not been known to police.
The killings took place in north Toronto in the early afternoon. The agreed facts later put before the court were plain on the central point: he had intended to kill the people he targeted, and the killings were planned and deliberate. Of the twenty-six people named in the charges, ten died that day, eight women and two men.
A Toronto police officer made the arrest. Minassian then gave detectives a recorded interview that ran for about four hours. The recording was later played in full at his trial.
The prime minister said the next day that authorities saw no national security element in the case. Minassian was never charged with a terrorism offense.
On Tuesday, April 24, 2018, Minassian made his first appearance in a Toronto court. He was charged with ten counts of first-degree murder and thirteen counts of attempted murder. He did not enter a plea. He was ordered held without bail and remanded to May 10.
As the investigation went on, the attempted murder counts rose from thirteen to sixteen, and the indictment that went to trial named twenty-six people in all: ten as murdered and sixteen as the targets of attempted murder.
Late in 2018 Ontario's deputy attorney general granted the prosecution's request to send the case directly to trial without a preliminary hearing, the step at which a judge ordinarily decides whether the evidence is enough to proceed. The trial was first set for February 2020, in the Superior Court of Justice in Toronto. It did not open until November 2020, by which time the pandemic had closed courtrooms across the province.
Minassian chose to be tried by a judge sitting alone rather than by a jury. With the facts of the killings conceded, the trial would turn almost entirely on psychiatric and psychological evidence, and the decision would rest with one judge.
The trial began on Tuesday, November 10, 2020, and it was conducted by video link. Minassian appeared from a detention center in Toronto. The courtroom itself was closed to the public; for the families of the dead and for the injured, viewing rooms were set up in a convention center downtown, where the proceedings were shown on screens.
On the first day the Crown read an agreed statement of facts into the record. In it Minassian admitted that he had planned and carried out the killings of April 23. He agreed that he had intended to kill them. He agreed that the murders were planned and deliberate. He entered pleas of not guilty, and his lawyers asked the court to find him not criminally responsible on account of mental disorder.
The prosecution told the court that the only issue in the trial was criminal responsibility, and that experts in psychiatry and psychology would carry most of the evidence. The recorded police interview was played early, and the trial then moved to the assessments.
In the first week a dispute arose over a defense-retained expert's report. The assessment concluded that Minassian's thinking was "concrete and inflexible" and that his autism had distorted it in a way "similar to psychosis" at the time of the killings. The Crown learned that the interviews on which the report rested had been recorded, and asked for the recordings so that its own experts could test the conclusions. The judge ruled that if the defense called those experts, the Crown would be entitled to the recordings the moment the witnesses took the stand. The following week Minassian's father testified for the defense.
The defense case was led by an American forensic psychiatrist. He told the court that autism had prevented Minassian from developing empathy, and that without it he could not grasp the wrongness of his acts as other people do, or make a rational choice about them. The Crown called its own forensic psychiatrist, who testified that Minassian had some capacity for empathy and knew that what he did was wrong. A third forensic psychiatrist, of long standing in the field, gave the opinion that Minassian did not meet the legal test for a finding of not criminally responsible.
Minassian gave his examiners a shifting set of reasons for the killings. He described one to the police and others, later, to the doctors who assessed him. The defense presented his account of his own mind as the product of his disorder. The prosecution answered that the court was looking at a mass murderer who happened to have autism, not at a man whose autism had caused the murders, and that he had understood that killing was wrong in the eyes of society. Several autism advocacy groups spoke out during the trial against the defense, warning that it would stigmatize people with the condition.
Closing arguments were heard in December 2020, after about six weeks of evidence. The judge reserved her decision.
The judgment was delivered on Wednesday, March 3, 2021, and streamed live to the public online. Throughout her reasons the judge referred to the accused as "John Doe." She explained that she did not wish to add to the notoriety he had sought, while noting that his name was already widely known; she made no order forbidding its publication.
She accepted that autism spectrum disorder could qualify as a mental disorder for the purposes of the defense, and she accepted that Minassian had the disorder. Under section 16 of the Criminal Code, the burden lay on the defense to prove, on a balance of probabilities, that the disorder had made him incapable of knowing that his acts were wrong. That burden, she held, had not been met.
She found that he knew that killing people was against the law, and that he knew it was morally wrong by the standards of society. He had chosen to do it anyway. She called the killings "an act of a reasoning mind." The absence of remorse, and of empathy for the people he killed, did not change the answer. A lack of empathy, she held, even a genuine incapacity for it, does not on its own amount to a defense under the Criminal Code.
She found Minassian guilty on all twenty-six counts: ten of first-degree murder and sixteen of attempted murder. He was 28. In Canada a conviction for first-degree murder carries a mandatory sentence of life imprisonment, with no eligibility for parole for twenty-five years, so the verdict settled the shape of the punishment before any sentencing hearing was held. The court set March 18, 2021, to discuss the next steps.
One of the women hurt on April 23, 2018, died on October 28, 2021. Toronto police announced the death in November 2021 and said it was now linked to the events of April 2018, which brought the number of dead to eleven. Investigators said they were working with the Office of the Chief Coroner and with the Crown on the case.
No new charge followed. A police spokesman said his understanding was that no new charge would be laid, and that the judge would take into account at sentencing that there was a new victim. Minassian had already been convicted of attempting to murder her, and that count stood.
Sentencing had been expected in January 2022. It took place on Monday, June 13, 2022, after hearings at which the injured, the families of the dead and people who had come to help that afternoon spoke to the court.
The law on multiple murders had changed shortly before. Since 2011 the Criminal Code had allowed a judge, in a case of more than one murder, to order the twenty-five-year periods of parole ineligibility to run one after another rather than together. On May 27, 2022, in R. v. Bissonnette, the Supreme Court of Canada held that the provision, section 745.51 of the Criminal Code, violated section 12 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which guards against cruel and unusual punishment, and was therefore unconstitutional. The ruling came seventeen days before Minassian was sentenced, and it took stacked parole periods off the table.
The judge sentenced him to life imprisonment on each of the ten counts of first-degree murder, with no eligibility for parole for twenty-five years, the periods to run together as the Supreme Court now required. She explained that the recent ruling prevented her from ordering consecutive periods. On fifteen of the sixteen counts of attempted murder she imposed twenty years, to be served at the same time as the life terms.
The sixteenth count was the one concerning the woman who had died in October 2021. On that count the judge imposed life imprisonment. In law the conviction remained one for attempted murder; in the sentence the court passed, the eleventh death was answered in the same measure as the first ten.
Parole after twenty-five years is not automatic. At the end of that period Minassian may apply for it; he does not qualify for release as of right.
In the week of July 15, 2022, about a month after sentencing, Minassian filed a notice of appeal against his convictions in the Court of Appeal for Ontario. He argued that the trial judge had "misapprehended" the expert evidence on which the case had turned.
In 2024 the Court of Appeal decided R. v. Hason, an unrelated case in which concerns had been raised about evidence given by the same forensic psychiatrist the Crown had called at Minassian's trial. After that decision the Ontario Crown sent a communication to all of its prosecutors and reviewed a set of earlier cases involving the psychiatrist. In August 2024 Minassian's lawyers asked for disclosure, and he later applied to the Court of Appeal for production of the communication, of the list of cases that had been reviewed, and of the Crown's reasons for choosing them, as groundwork for a request to put fresh evidence before the court. He narrowed the request in the end to the direction the communication contained.
In early 2026, in R. v. Minassian, 2026 ONCA 150, the Court of Appeal dismissed the production motion. It found no reasonable possibility that the list of reviewed cases would help a fresh evidence application, and no reasonable possibility that the direction on its own would help him. It held that solicitor-client privilege protected the details of the Crown's internal review. The Crown told the court that its review had found no concerns beyond those already raised in an earlier Superior Court case, R. v. Nettleton, decided in 2023.
On November 6, 2026, the Court of Appeal for Ontario confirmed that Minassian had abandoned the appeal of his convictions on ten counts of first-degree murder and sixteen counts of attempted murder. With that, the convictions are final.
As of November 2026 Minassian is serving his life sentence in Canada. He is not eligible to apply for parole until twenty-five years have passed. There is no further appeal pending.
Under section 16 of the Criminal Code, a person whose mental disorder made him incapable of knowing that his act was wrong is not criminally responsible for it. The defense must prove that incapacity on a balance of probabilities. Had the defense succeeded, Minassian would have been sent to a secure psychiatric hospital rather than to prison. The trial judge accepted that autism spectrum disorder can be a mental disorder within the section, and held that Minassian had nonetheless been capable of knowing that his acts were wrong.
His sentencing came seventeen days after the Supreme Court's decision in Bissonnette. The 2011 provision had allowed the twenty-five-year periods of parole ineligibility to be stacked in multiple-murder cases. With section 745.51 struck down, the court that sentenced Minassian imposed a single twenty-five-year period for all eleven deaths.
Minassian's guilt was never in dispute. He admitted the acts and the intent in an agreed statement of facts, and the trial concerned only his state of mind. On that question the court preferred the Crown's experts and found him criminally responsible; the defense position that autism had left him unable to know that his acts were wrong was rejected on the evidence. His appeal, which argued that the trial judge had misapprehended the expert evidence, was abandoned before the Court of Appeal decided it, so that ground was never ruled on.
The death in October 2021 was linked by police to the events of April 23, 2018, and the court treated it as a killing at sentencing, but it carries no murder conviction of its own. The conviction on that count is for attempted murder.
2017: Joins the Canadian Armed Forces; asks to be released after sixteen days of recruit training.
April 23, 2018: Ten people are killed and sixteen others are targeted in north Toronto; Minassian is arrested the same afternoon.
April 24, 2018: First court appearance; charged with ten counts of first-degree murder and thirteen of attempted murder; held without bail.
Late 2018: Ontario's deputy attorney general grants the request to proceed directly to trial without a preliminary hearing.
May 2019: The case stands at ten counts of first-degree murder and sixteen of attempted murder, with trial set for February 2020.
November 10, 2020: Judge-alone trial opens by video link in the Ontario Superior Court of Justice; agreed statement of facts read.
December 2020: Closing arguments heard; decision reserved.
March 3, 2021: Found guilty of ten counts of first-degree murder and sixteen counts of attempted murder; not criminally responsible defense rejected.
October 28, 2021: One of the surviving women dies; no new charge is laid.
May 27, 2022: The Supreme Court of Canada, in R. v. Bissonnette, strikes down section 745.51 of the Criminal Code.
June 13, 2022: Sentenced to life with no parole eligibility for twenty-five years; twenty years concurrent on fifteen attempted murder counts; life on the count concerning the woman who died in 2021.
July 2022: Files a notice of appeal in the Court of Appeal for Ontario.
Early 2026: The Court of Appeal dismisses his production motion, 2026 ONCA 150.
November 6, 2026: The Court of Appeal confirms that he has abandoned his appeal.