Ayanle Hassan Ali was a “very charismatic, very caring person,” but in 2011 a relative began to notice “dramatic” changes.

“He wasn’t as social, wasn’t as charismatic,” said his mother’s cousin, Mariam Adam, whom Ali called “Auntie.”

“He started to talk about crazy conspiracies, talking about the working class, the rich, the Illuminati, atheists, Jesus.”

Adam, who now lives in the United States, told the Star that Ali had been staying with her in Edmonton, after having put his studies at the University of Calgary on hold.

Not long after she noticed the changes in his behaviour, Adam said Ali’s mother asked that he come back to stay with her in Toronto. She hasn’t been able to speak to him since.

Born in 1988 in Montreal to Somali immigrant parents, Ali is the only boy in a family of four, Adam said, which includes an older sister who went to Oxford University and now works as an optometrist in London.

The family moved to Toronto when Ali was two years old, and Adam said he graduated high school here.

“He was very smart for his age, kind of like an old soul,” she said. “We’d watch cartoons and he’d want to watch the Discovery Channel.”

She said Ali took his mother Maryam’s diagnosis of mental illness in 2001 particularly hard. His mother was a big part of Ali’s life, she said, taking him to soccer practice and encouraging him in school.

About a year after the diagnosis, Adam said Ali’s father left the family.

“I don’t blame him, though,” she said, adding that life had become very difficult and Maryam had wanted him out of the house.

Mental illness is a taboo in practically any culture, but Abdifatah Warsame, a Somali community leader, said it can be especially tough in the Somali community, where some see the mentally ill as being possessed.

He said he once ran into Maryam at a Rexdale burger restaurant where she pushed him and told him to duck, mentioning shots fired and the KGB.

“That shows that mental illness is a taboo,” he said. “We stigmatize the person. But we’re learning. Because it’s wrong.”

After graduating with honours in high school, Ali took some time off before applying and being accepted at the University of Calgary, Adam said. But he left in his third year, saying he wanted to work to help take care of his family, so he moved in with her in Edmonton.

He took a security course, but worked just one day on an oilpatch in Alberta because he didn’t like it, Adam said. It was while she was staying at home for a few months that she began to notice the changes in him.

“I started to think: Is he starting to become like his mother?”

Adam came for a visit last year, but she said Maryam, who lived in an apartment with Ali and his youngest sister, would only talk to her through the door, and she wasn’t able to speak to Ali.

Adam said she wishes Ali had received the treatment she feels he desperately needs.

“He was never taken to a psychiatrist, never evaluated,” she claims. “No one took it upon themselves to help him.”

Correction - March 16, 2016: This article was edited from a previous version that mistakenly said Ayanle Hassan Ali put his engineering studies at the University of Calgary on hold. In fact, according to the University, Ali was registered as an open studies student in the winter 2009 and summer 2009 terms.

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