Ontario man arrested for selling suicide substance.

Alex Schadenberg
Executive Director, Euthanasia Prevention Coalition

An Ontario man, Kenneth Law, has been arrested and charged with two counts of assisting a suicide and is known to have assisted the suicide of at least 7 people in the US and the UK.

Neha Raju and Tom Parfett

Lucas Casaletto reported for City News that:

Peel Regional Police announced the arrest of a 57-year-old Ontario man stemming from the online distribution of sodium nitrite across the Greater Toronto Area (GTA) that resulted in two deaths.

Authorities in Peel Region opened an investigation following a report from the Times of London in the United Kingdom. It mentioned that a GTA resident named Kenneth Law had been selling sodium nitrite, a legal but lethal drug, to people in the U.K. and the U.S., which resulted in seven suicides.

On March 31, officers in Peel Region began investigating the circumstances of a sudden death in Ontario. It is believed that Law distributed and marketed the substance online to target individuals at risk of self-harm.

Law was arrested by Peel police on Tuesday and charged with two counts of counselling or aiding in suicide. He appeared briefly in a Brampton court on Wednesday, where his case was put over to next week. 

An article by George Odling for the Daily Mail explains that Kenneth Law is linked to four suicide deaths in the UK including Neha Raju and Tom Parfett. Odling reported that: 

Law allegedly gave instructions about the poison to an undercover reporter posing as a suicidal customer, and boasted that some buyers had told him he was doing 'God's work'.

He claimed to have sent the poison to hundreds of buyers in Britain and pledged to continue to do so until he had exhausted his inventory - despite pleas from UK police forces and coroners.

Odling also reported that Anthony Jones, an American who also died after consuming the substance obtained from Law told his mother, as he was dying, that he wanted to live. 

Ximena Knol

Similarly, a Netherlands man was arrested on Febuary 21, 2022 in the deaths of four people who died after ingesting a suicide powder.

Ximena, who was 19 years-old, died in February 2018 after ingesting the suicide powder.

 

The Netherland Coöperatie Laatste Wil (CLW) assisted suicide group has promoted the suicide powder. The Public Prosecution Service arrested the CLW chairman, Jos van Wijk, in September 2021 for his alleged involvement in promoting and distributing the suicide powder.

 

Kenneth Law was distributing the same suicide powder as the The Netherland Coöperatie Laatste Wil (CLW) group was promoting.

EPC published an article by Randy Knol, the father of Ximena. Since then Randy has been working to ban the lethal suicide powder. Randy is the founder and chairman of the Ximena’s Butterfly Foundation.