‘Am I just going to chicken out?’ Alek Minassian’s moment of indecision before deadly van attack – By Adrian Humphreys (National Post) / Dec 8 2020
Was he wrestling with his conscience? Does it undo his claim his mental disorder made him incapable of knowing right from wrong?
TORONTO — There was a moment, all too fleeting, when Alek Minassian almost decided not to crank the steering wheel of his rented van towards a crowded sidewalk to kill as many people as he could.
He was driving down Yonge Street on April 23, 2018 and stopped at a red light, where he sat and pondered, he said.
“Am I really going to be able to hit the accelerator or am I just going to chicken out and just drive past the intersection,” he asked himself, he recalled in interviews with psychiatrists.
“Because it is such a big act, people didn’t normally do this, obviously I was hesitating,” Minassian said.
He was “nervous” and did a “mental rehearsal,” imagining himself pushing the pedal and mounting the curb, he said.
For the week leading up to the day — to “rev” himself up — he focused on the incel ideology (an angry, misogynist worldview of “involuntary celibates”) as a way of “forcing myself into the mindset … so that I don’t chicken out at the last minute.
