Matt DeHart, a former U.S. soldier seeking asylum in Canada, claims hes wanted for working with Anonymous. The U.S. says he may be a spy and more

By Adrian Humphreys

MILTON, ONT., APRIL 2014 Guards at the Maplehurst Correctional Complex, a maximum-security jail near Toronto known to inmates as the Milton Hilton, came to rouse their newest prisoner from a concrete bed in the intake holding cells. Pulling back the hoodie covering his face, they found his T-shirt had been yanked up and twisted around his throat as a ligature.

The distraught prisoner was Matt DeHart, a 29-year-old American who had been brought to jail days earlier by a Canada Border Services Agency official and five police officers, who arrested him at the apartment he shares with his parents while fighting for refugee protection here.

Pulled from the cell and taken to hospital, he appeared to suffer no serious physical injury but underwent a mental health assessment. After returning to jail, Matt then dived headfirst from his bunk onto the concrete floor of his cell, requiring another urgent hospital visit. He told doctors he had crashed on purpose because he had no hope.

Days later, Matt appeared by video link at a detention review before a tribunal of Canadas Immigration and Refugee Board (IRB). It took half an hour for jail guards to retrieve him from a one-to-one suicide watch cell and sit him in front of the camera. Matt silently peered into the lens. He looked dreadful: unshaven and unkempt, his eyes red and swollen, his lids heavy from medication. He squinted and grimaced.

Its not that Im not patriotic I am. I voted for Bush. My family is military, pretty gung ho. But everything has changed. Matt DeHart

Gone was his bravado and the wide, almost goofy smile he seemed shy about flashing during many meetings with the National Post over the past eight months, while he was on bail from immigration detention on strict conditions. His father, Paul DeHart, a retired U.S. Air Force major who worked for the powerful National Security Agency, sat grim-faced, watching his son on the video monitor.

Were here on a claim of torture, Paul said, his voice straining as he stated Matt has been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder. To visit your son in a maximum-security prison in a suicide smock more heavily medicated than hes ever been For anyone with PTSD to be treated that way, much less your own child is very disturbing.

This is decidedly not how the DeHarts envisioned life in Canada as they drove across the border little more than a year earlier, on April 3, 2013, seeking refugee protection. They claim U.S. authorities tortured Matt during a national security investigation.

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Hacker, creeper, soldier, spy: The bizarre story of Matt DeHart