TORONTO

A mentally-ill Toronto man, who found his way to Brazil over five years, is back in Toronto this week with a burgeoning crowd-sourcing campaign to bridge his re-entry into society.

A GoFundMe page, launched by the family of sometime anti-poverty activist Anton Pilipa, had reached a six-day total of $13,000 Friday. That far surpassed the $8,000 target set by Anton’s brother Stefan, who retrieved his sibling from a Brazilian mental hospital in December.

As outlined on the GoFundMe page, the money is earmarked for various airfares, hospital and consular fees, plus rent money to facilitate Anton’s reintegration.

“This is overwhelming for him,” Stefan told CBC Metro Morning this week. “He has not been part of society for five years. He’s been an alien in other countries. Even going down there I felt torn about bringing him back to this, a society that may not treat him well.”

Anton Pilipa’s situation had reached the stage of family intervention in March 2012 when he disappeared. He’d earlier been involved in an altercation that resulted in assault and weapons charges. He was reportedly arrested on his return Monday and released on bail.

According to his brother, Anton had felt “claustrophobic” from the family attention and was set up in a Scarborough apartment. One day he disappeared, leaving his belongings behind.

When he came to the attention of local police, a Canadian-born Brazilian police officer took it upon herself to hunt down the missing man with only his first name and “Canadian” as clues from the uncommunicative Pilipa.

She managed to find Stefan and emailed him a photo.

How Anton managed the 10,000 km trek to the Amazon rain forest — most of it presumably on foot — remains a mystery.

“Throughout the month of January,” the GoFundMe page continues, “Stefan did the work of arranging to bring him home, rounding up identification, a passport, and arranging travel permissions and flights. This work has been very expensive and is straining the resources of this working class family.”

Anton complicated the return plans by briefly escaping from the mental hospital, prompting worries he would end up lost in the jungle.

His reunion with his brother, Stefan said on Metro Morning, “was sad, because he’d been in a poorly staffed and poorly run mental hospital. He’d been drugged, not given very much food. I cried a bit and he was really emotional. It was good to see him but it was hard to see him in such rough shape.”

jslotek@postmedia.com