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A Man with Disabilities Was Found Dead in an Underground Cistern. What Happened?

“It was absolutely disgusting,” said the police about the care home where Guy Mitchell drowned

Flashes of blue and red lit up the darkening country sky, emergency vehicles crowding this normally desolate stretch of road in the sleepy rural community of Jerseyville near Hamilton, Ontario. Towering evergreens cast colourful shadows on the grassy field with a small pitch-black hole at its centre.

“911. Police, fire, ambulance?” answered the dispatcher.

“Um, ambulance, please.”

Not much earlier on Sunday, April 29, 2012, Guy Mitchell, a slight thirty-eight-year-old man with a ginger goatee, had grabbed his jacket from a corridor of overstuffed cubbies, dozens of scattered shoes and debris, and bounded out the door toward the long driveway that insulated the house from the road.

“What is your emergency?”

“Um, I have somebody who fell in a well,” said Keri Santor, Mitchell’s twenty-seven-year-old carer.

An emotionally intelligent yet intellectually disabled man known for his energy and sociability, Mitchell delighted in helping others.

“Is that person inside the residence right now?”

“No, they’re in the well!”

Mitchell had veered off the driveway and stumbled into the long grass, his shaky double vision only sometimes corrected by glasses that were often misplaced or being repaired. In front of him, a small rectangular opening in the ground led to an underground cistern normally used to water the animals and garden. A flimsy plywood cover occasionally sat precariously on top, the definition of an accident waiting to happen.

“And when you looked in, you just called in, and you couldn’t get his attention?”

“I couldn’t get any response from him. I tried to pull him out on my own so I could do CPR and couldn’t get him out.”

“Okay, how deep is it?” asked the dispatcher.

“It’s a cistern. It’s very deep, and he’s floating at the top.”

Bracing himself against the concrete lip of the opening, the man had likely grabbed a bucket and leaned far into the hole, the waterline just beyond reach. He had lived here in relative harmony with the Santors, his host family, for much of his life. Now, the filthy house had no running water and no heat.

“Okay. All right, listen. I’m going to get some extra assistance, okay? So, you tried to pull him out, and you could not?”

“I couldn’t lift him out on my own, no.”

“Okay. Just stay on the line with me for one moment, okay? Don’t hang up. Are you there by yourself?”

“Yes,” the caller answered after a brief pause.

Only the man and his carer know what truly happened that night. It seemed like the kind of freak accident that could have happened to anyone. But upon entering the residence, police, social workers, and family were shocked. Within hours, questions began to form about what was really going on.

“It was absolutely disgusting,” the acting sergeant testified about entering the Santor property, a group home for individuals with special needs. “It’s probably one of the worst homes in my thirty plus years as a police officer.”

A few hours after Mitchell was pulled from the cistern, police led the interim executive director of Choices, a service agency originally established as the North Wentworth Association for the Mentally Retarded by Keri’s deceased mother Karen Santor, through the squalid house. “It was a very quiet tour,” the officer testified. “I think it was an eye opener for them.”

Police treated the incident as a crime scene, cordoning off the property and sending in a forensic investigation team to take pictures. High-definition photographs were taken of nearly every square inch of the property and house, including highly detailed spherical panoramic shots of the grounds. Together, a viewer could literally tour through the house and property as it appeared that dark and shadowy night.

From the road, the Santor property looked like a vacant and unkempt parcel of land, the distant house walled off by mature trees that separated it from the grassy area that was dotted with wiry bushes and willows. The old cistern was........

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