Written by Dr. Okafor. This begins in 2016, the first time I heard about a report made by Shantel Thomas 4 years prior. The investigator in charge at the time, Mr. Gary Hickey had called my office one day to say he had sent me a letter a few weeks earlier to which he was still awaiting a response. I told him I had not seen it yet but will check for it and get back to him. Days later I did find it in the pile from the Walmart mail office, read it, and called him back. I explained my recollections of this woman to him over the phone and he very nicely let me know that he is retiring that December and would like to get a written response from me on it to enable him to close the file.

I agreed to do so and did: my knight in shining armor letter where I explained that Shantel Thomas was someone I had met non-professionally through her mom, a Nurse colleague from The William Osler Hospital, and subsequently her mom would confide in me that her daughter was a troubled sex trade worker, who works out of town, with a hard-drinking problem, a foul-mouth, and a tendency, amongst other behavioral discrepancies, to lie in her own vomit in the basement when she visited her mother. Horrified (Ms. Pauline was the most pleasant, articulate, genteel Jamaican Canadian I had ever met and this relationship of the seemingly pleasant young lady riding in the front passenger seat of her car when I first met her was a shock), I asked her: “Do you want me to talk some sense into her?” I asked, confident that some serious African-style, hard-hitting, common-sense talk would make an impact on this poor, misguided woman. Ms. Pauline gratefully agreed and gave me Shantel’s number. And so began an informal, long-distance telephone relationship in which she was encouraged to call and ask me for advice at any time it was needed. Now a known acquaintance, Shantel would then drop by my office a few times on a walk-in basis when she came to town to visit her mother: 7 billed visits in total, from November 2010 to May 2011, she would leave with prescriptions she never filled or used as stated by her during the hearing.

My much maligned and twisted-out-of-context letter therefore clearly explains that: Shantel, was extremely troubled, an exotic dancer by profession with significant behavioral and substance abuse issues, who at the behest of her beleaguered mother I had called upon and counseled severally in the past and who remains a disturbed young lady, with the personality of a dragon, for whom I retained the deepest compassion and would gladly still be a knight in shining armor to if need be. This sense of St George and the Dragon is what would be savagely taken out of context by malicious College agents, who cleverly kept the Dragon references silent and published the shining knight term as a romantic allusion. Mr. Gary Hickey, on the other hand, apparently received my letter with satisfaction and I never heard from him again, and past December 16, the date Gary informed me he was retiring, I concluded, to all intents and purposes, that was the end of the matter.

It is important to note at this point, that Dr. Okafor is a flowery writer, a historian, a poet, and a walking encyclopedia. He is an extremely intellectual being; some of his works can be found online. He has written several articles for newspapers, especially in Nigeria under his pseudonyms without being paid a dime. I will share his work if the situation presents itself.