Death Threat? What death threat?

There is absolutely no doubt that I was banned from the University of Winnipeg in January of 2012 because of reports of a death threat I had made. Don Metz would testify that he was 100% sure it was a death threat. Yet when I first asked him on the witness stand why I was banned from the campus, he claimed he didn't know. It was only with great effort that I could get him to "remember" the incident with the death threat.

The funny thing is that VP Neil Besner's memory was no better when it came to the same incident. You'd think that if a student got banned from the campus for making death threats that the people involved would remember the reason. But apparently not.

So I thought that security chief Martin Grainger, who actually signed the trespassing order, would be able to set things straight. Wrong again. Grainger had yet another theory as to the reason for the ban. Under direct examination, he said that the trespassing order was drawn up on the basis that when the Registrar had asked security to accompany him to deliver a classroom suspension notice, they decided they might as well ban me from the property altogether. And when pressed as to the reasons for the classroom suspension, he testified that the only complaint he knew about was that I had verbally assaulted a classroom guest, an ASL interpreter who had been invited for a presentation.

There is no doubt that I was banned because of the death threat. So why did three different witnesses, when asked for the reason, profess to know nothing about it? I'll let you think about that for a while.

And while you're thinking about it, remember there were two trespassing orders. One in 2012 for the "death threat", and the other in 2013 for the "home invasion".  The funny thing is that the same witnesses who couldn't remember the death threat of 2012 were equally evasive when it came to remembering the home invasion of 2013.

It's hard to avoid the conclusion that the University knew that both the "death threat" and the "home invasion" were cock-and-bull stories that wouldn't hold water under scrutiny. They could get away with it in their own internal star chambers, where I wasn't allowed to know the charges against me or confront my accusers. But this was a real court, and the rules were different.  That explains why the University was being deliberately evasive, trying to muddy the waters by asserting multiple reasons for the two trespassing orders. But in doing so, they had made a huge mistake.

The "verbal assault" on the ASL interpreter had nothing to do with the reason I was in court. But by invoking it as a reason for the first trespassing order (and then trying to argue that the second order was merely an extension of the first) they had opened it up for cross-examination. So I subpoenaed Lauralyn Cantor, the professor who had witnessed the verbal assault, and whose written complaint to the Dean would form a major pillar of the Non-Academic Misconduct charges which led to my expulsion.

Her testimony would be disastrous for the university.