The 19-year-old Sri Lankan national charged in the mass killing of a newcomer family in Ottawa has no plan to seek bail, his lawyer says.
Febrio De-Zoysa was arrested and charged in early March with six counts of first-degree murder and one count of attempted murder, after police found the family dead in a townhouse in the suburb of Barrhaven.
He remains in custody, and his lawyer Ewan Lyttle told The Canadian Press “there is presently no plan to apply for bail.”
De-Zoysa, who was studying in Canada as an international student, is set to return to court next week where lawyers expect to set dates for a preliminary inquiry in his case.
Investigators allege the young man is responsible for the deaths of 35-year-old Darshani Ekanayake and her four children, who were between the ages of two months and seven years old, as well as a family friend.
They believe the family was attacked with a knife or “other edged weapon.”
As neighbours and Ottawa residents learned the first details of the gruesome crime, staff at Algonquin College in Ottawa were investigating the possible connections to the school.
The college’s president asked his staff to look into it after Ottawa police Chief Eric Stubbs revealed at a press conference that De-Zoysa was an international student.
“Do we know where the suspect was studying?,” Claude Brule wrote in an email to a colleague that afternoon.
The Canadian Press obtained the emails through a freedom-of-information request.
“He last attended classes in January of 2023,” another member of the Algonquin College staff wrote back several hours later.
The next day, Bruce Hickey, the college’s communication manager, said they had asked a colleague “to run the names of the two adult deceased from Barrhaven through our system.”
The exact program De-Zoysa was registered for was redacted in the documents, as was most other personal information like his addresses, birthdate and student number.
In a statement on Thursday, Hickey said the emails show the work college staff did to respond to the “many media requests” about the tragedy.
