Two weeks before police shot Samuel Maloney dead at his London home, a name matching his surfaced on a racist manifesto that went out to email subscribers of his neighbourhood’s movie theatre, The Free Press has learned.

Maloney and his common-law spouse Melissa Facciolo have a long connection with the Hyland Cinema, located near their Old South home on Duchess Avenue where heavily-armed police descended in pre-dawn darkness two days before Christmas with a warrant to search.



Samuel Maloney

Maloney handled the theatre’s website and Facciolo is its graphic designer.

Exactly what happened at 56 Duchess Ave. — one officer was hit by a crossbow, The Free Press was told — remains shrouded in mystery, with Ontario’s police watchdog agency investigating the shooting and London police not talking. It was the first fatal police shooting in London in 17 years.



56 Duchess Avenue

Three officers are subjects of the probe by the Special Investigations Unit (SIU) and 18 others have been designated as witness officers, underlining the heavy police presence near the bungalow that morning.

But while many questions remain for Londoners about what happened around 6 a.m. that day on Duchess, Maloney — a 35-year-old computer programmer — also remains something of a question mark, with the name appearing on the bottom of the manifesto adding a new dimension to the case.

The name Sam Maloney appeared on the bottom of the manifesto, a rambling rant titled The Declaration of the Independence of Atlantis that rages against the mixing of races and links to an anti-Semitic video.

The Hyland’s website was hacked Dec. 11, with the manifesto posted there and inserted into the cinema’s hijacked email mail-out to thousands of subscribers under the tagline Hyland Movie Guide: Special God’s Holy Day Edition.

Police did not respond to requests for comment Thursday.

Maloney’s defence lawyer Nick Cake, who was on the phone with Maloney when he was shot by police, said he couldn’t comment on anything about the Hyland investigation, citing solicitor-client privilege and a court-ordered publication ban on the evidence at the bail hearing of Maloney’s wife, Facciolo, 35, who was charged with weapon and ammunition offences after the shooting.



Melissa Facciolo

Hyland operator Moira Adlan said Thursday police told her they’d launched an investigation into the hacking.

Adlan said the news of Maloney’s death came as a blow to the company.

“We are really, really sad. We worked with them for 10 years and this is a big loss,” she said.

Adlan said she doesn’t know if the police raid on Maloney’s home was linked to the investigation into the Hyland hacking.

“We are really sad about everything,” she said.

“We are sad that our members had to be exposed to hate propaganda. And we are sad about this.”

She wouldn’t say whether she has spoken to Facciolo, who is charged with one count of possession of a prohibited weapon, specifically a crossbow, and possession of ammunition while prohibited, after the Dec. 23 confrontation.

Maloney was a computer programmer dedicated to building a free open-source data storing and sharing system. Online, he also went by the handles MorphisCreator and Thufir, which are linked in various chats to similar manifestos and rants against the mixing of races.

The email sent to Hyland subscribers links to an anti-Semitic video on a site Maloney spent years building. Adlan didn’t want to comment further Thursday on the investigation, saying she’s waiting to learn the results of the SIU probe and the police investigation, “just like everyone else.”

She said while she’d never personally met Maloney, she grew to know Facciolo over the years and felt the couple were part of the Hyland family.

Adlan said Facciolo was a loving mom who was busy with the couple’s two young children and believed in buying organic and local. Adlan said she knew nothing about Maloney’s political views or about the anti-Semitic online comments linked to his profiles.

“He programmed our website. It was driven by a database. He created the database website that had a user-friendly back end. It’s quite well done,” she said.

“I never met him. I didn’t need to. It worked.”

jlobrien@postmedia.com

hdaniszewski@postmedia.com