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“He happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time,” Arenburg said by way of explanation in a 2014 interview with CBC’s The Fifth Estate.

Arenburg surrendered to police the next day and was eventually found not criminally responsible for the killing. He was granted an unconditional discharge from a psychiatric facility in 2006, having taken his medication faithfully and not having had any recurrence of psychotic episodes. But a year later, he was in trouble again for punching a U.S. border guard at the Peace Bridge crossing in Buffalo. He had stopped taking his medication.

Arenburg represented himself at the trial in a performance that his court-appointed adviser described as “an excursion into the mind of Mr. Arenburg, a mind that is ill and in need of medical assistance.”

Arenburg spent a year in a U.S. jail before being released and deported back to Canada.

Photo by Rod MacIvor / OTT

He was living in Nova Scotia, his home province, when he was interviewed by The Fifth Estate for a story on “not criminally responsible” cases.

“OK, I shot Brian Smith,” Arenburg told the interviewer before adding he has “a right to have a life without everybody being told what to think.”

Asked what he would say to the widow Kainz if he could, Arenburg responded: “What could I say? I can’t change yesterday. It don’t matter. If I bawl my eyes out to the end of the world, I can’t change what happened yesterday or 18 years ago or 20 years ago. Don’t matter what I do.”

Arenburg returned to Ottawa in 2014 after The Fifth Estate program aired and lived for a period at the Ottawa Mission. At the time, Kainz was living just a few blocks away on Rideau Street and would regularly walk her dog past the mission. She moved just before Arenburg arrived.