The police failed him

Family suing officials who they say didn’t adequately respond to man’s crisis

- JENNIFER PAGLIARO

Framed photos and poster boards line Debbie Indal’s apartment.

Her son, Taresh Ramroop, smiles back from most of them — in a red cap and gown after graduating from Seneca College; in his purple and black FedEx uniform; as a small boy in a white dress shirt and belted slacks.

But Ramroop, whose family lovingly calls him Bobby, is not here. The bedroom, the one with the window he climbed out of and fell 16 storeys, is now home to piles of orange bottles for the pills that help Indal cope with post-traumatic stress.

Indal pulls back the dark curtain in front of the window to show the sliding pane of glass that opens to leave a gap exactly 21.7 inches wide.

That fact, one of many devastating details of Ramroop’s death, is detailed in the report from the director of the police watchdog that cleared of wrongdoing the Toronto police officers who responded to the apartment that day.

Now, his mother, Indal, and sister, Vanessa Persaud, are suing Toronto police, alleging officers failed to adequately respond to the mentalhealth crisis their 32-year-old son and brother was having on that day in October 2022.

“My son’s death was senseless,” Indal tells the Star. “The police failed him.”

What the Special Investigations Unit’s report doesn’t reflect is the unending anguish of Ramroop’s family — how Indal won’t make her son’s favourite turkey dish again; how bystander videos of his death haunt them still.

For all its details and analysis, what the report doesn’t talk about is the unanswered questions left for families when people die after interactions with the police. They are questions the city has yet to fully grapple with after several high-profile incidents. Why were heavily armed tactical officers called in? Why didn’t police let Ramroop’s mother speak to him, even when he was begging to hear her voice “one last time?”