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It was a dire portrait, one the family said they had fought valiantly to ameliorate but failed.

Photo by Hussain family/AP

No sooner had they gone public than on social media and in the mainstream media those with political points to score or axes to grind were seizing upon Hussain’s purported illness as proof either that the violence he unleashed was solely the product of that and nothing else or that it was somehow confirmation the authorities were conspiring to hide his ostensible extremist leanings.

Yet if the truth is out there, and it may not be, it probably lies as it often does in the murky middle.

The National Post has learned that Toronto Police files show little evidence of the typical history of a person with a florid mental illness such as “psychosis,” as his family said.

A senior police source, while cautioning that this doesn’t mean Hussain wasn’t mentally ill, said that often with such people, there are frequent encounters with police — calls from the family for help, suicide attempts or committals to hospital under the Mental Health Act.

With Hussain, the source said, “we have very little of that.”

The third party, who had distributed the family’s statement, didn’t reply to a Post email Tuesday, asking if he had any light to shed on the apparent contradiction between the statement and police files.