Hurricane Katrina worked its way up the continent and landed in Toronto as a drenching storm on August 30, 2005. That night, members of the Queen’s Own Rifles were sending off a group of German paratroopers who had joined them in summer training exercises. Corporals Jeffrey Hall and Mountaz Ibrahim and rifleman Brian Deganis, all in their early 20s, were part of the celebrations at the Bier Markt, a sprawling pub on The Esplanade. Hall was already inebriated when they arrived. He’d started drinking around four that afternoon—beer and vodka—and even forced himself to vomit in order to sober up enough to con­tinue partying with the Germans. The festivities went on through the night and eventually ended at Budo, a nightclub on Peter Street. By that point, Hall and Deganis were falling-down drunk. A senior officer ordered Ibrahim and another reservist to escort their friends back to the regiment’s Moss Park Armoury.

Sometime before four in the morning, captain Peter St. Denis, who arranged the send-off for the visiting paratroopers, heard a commotion on the steps of the armoury. At the front door, he found Hall trying to restrain Deganis. “Fucking bum! Why is he dissing me? I’m going to kick his ass,” Deganis yelled to a shadowy figure in a bus shelter. St. Denis and Hall manoeuvred the rifleman inside, but he continued his harangue, shouting, “I’m the king of the world! I’m going to take them on.” Thinking he had defused the situation, St. Denis left the men to cool down—then returned when he heard another ruckus, this one coming from the north parking lot where Deganis had parked his pickup truck. Now it was Hall who was yelling at an officer from another unit, while Deganis attempted to play peacemaker. An exasperated St. Denis ordered the group to sleep it off or take a cab home.

What St. Denis didn’t expect was that Hall and Deganis would slip into the adjacent park. There, they spotted a figure on a bench, and Deganis taunted the man, who Hall says then lunged at them.

Paul Croutch was 59, with heart problems, emphysema, high blood pressure and swollen legs. That bench, on the pathway between Moss Park’s tennis courts and baseball diamond, was his favourite place to sleep. He preferred the open air over the shelters. At the centre of the bench was a curved metal bar designed to prevent people from sleeping on it. Croutch got around that by either curling himself up, or sleeping with his legs lying over the bar or sometimes squeezed underneath.

That night, Croutch was wrapped in a cocoon of black garbage bags to protect himself from the rain when Hall and Deganis laid into him with punches and kicks. He fell to the ground, probably unable to see his attackers since his face was mostly covered by the bags. The soldiers broke six of his ribs, fractured his back and ruptured his spleen. But it was the kicks to his head, administered by Hall, that caused the severe brain damage that would ultimately kill him. Hall yelled at Croutch that he was a “useless waste of skin” and that he should “get out of the fuckin’ park.”