DEADLY WORLD CAUGHT UP WITH UNLIKELY ADDICT

Of all the people sucked in to the vortex of drug addiction, Ken Robinson
was among the last you would expect to die violently.

He was a likable guy, a cheerful, chatty pepperpot, if a bit on the thin
and grizzled side.

He died Friday at age 53, stabbed to death in the entrance to a Wark Street
apartment building.

On Monday, three people appeared in court, charged with the first-degree
murder of Robinson. Shawn Edgar Tutty, 28, was arrested in Victoria on
Friday night. Two others, James Joseph Kennedy, 29, and Rebekah Csori, 24,
surrendered Monday.

All those involved were known to police, who described the killing as
drug-related. A witness told the TC's Gerard Young on Friday that he heard
people yelling about drugs, that the stabbed man owed a debt.

It would be easy to dismiss this as just another drug murder. That's pretty
much what I did until learning the identity of Friday's victim.

Ken Robinson was a barber -- my barber, for a while. It was a trade he
learned in prison, where he served time for, in his words, "being young and
stupid" back in the early 1970s. He once told me he had got mixed up with
some bad guys, and one night found himself bound to a chair and gun-whipped
by some other bad guys in a drug rip-off in the Helmcken Road area. Police
nabbed the lot of them and Ken wound up inside, learning to cut hair.

One day, the man who had attacked Ken was marched into the jail, and into
Robinson's barber chair, where the inmate sat trembling like a leaf as Ken
stood over him with a straight razor. "Don't worry," said Robinson. "I
won't hurt you."

It's hard to imagine Ken Robinson hurting anyone. Police, clients and
colleagues all described him as not having a mean bone in his body. He was
friendly and loquacious whenever I spoke with him, at one point talking
eagerly about getting his old rock-'n'-roll band back together. He seemed
proud of having put his past behind him.

Apparently it's not that easy. Addiction isn't discriminating, won't ease
its grip just because you're a good person who made some bad choices.

Robinson's bad choices were made young. The boy who loved soccer and music
ended up addicted to heroin. "Ken is an actual victim of marijuana as a
gateway drug," his father, Dave, said Monday. Ken fell in with a notorious
Victoria crowd that included the likes of Jimmy Page and Joseph Pagnotta,
both now dead. Pagnotta's own struggle with addiction ended in February
2004 when the knife-wielding man was shot dead by RCMP outside his Langford
home.

Ken went straight in the mid-'70s. He stayed clean for 18 years, opened his
own barber shop on Quadra. It was decked out in black and gold, the colours
of his favorite team, the Pittsburgh Steelers.

Then, in 1995, drugs re-entered his life. "Joey Pagnotta showed up and
dangled it in front of him," said his father.

Ken kept struggling back. He moved in with his parents for a few years,
worked at another barber shop, was doing pretty well until two or three
years ago. That's when the latest decline began.

"As parents, we were so bloody helpless," says Dave. Ken stopped working.
He was beaten up a couple of times in the last year, something from which
he tried to shield his parents.

"He kept this very, very secret and he did everything in his power to make
sure we weren't involved in it," says Dave.

Ken last visited his parents a couple of weeks ago.

Dave worked at Wilkinson Road jail for 15 years, and knows what addiction
can drive people to do. He appreciates how Ken didn't allow desperation to
get the best of him.

"He was honest with everybody," Dave says. "I am one parent who had a son
addicted to drugs who never stole from him. He never took a thing from the
house, never took any money."

Ken's parents learned a lot about addiction over the last 35 years, learned
how to distinguish between their son and the disease that held him.

"We never had anything but respect for him," says his dad. "We love him dearly."