‘She didn’t have to die so tragically,’ Regis Korchinski-Paquet’s neighbour told SIU

TORONTO — A neighbour broke up a fight between Regis Korchinski-Paquet and her brother hours before the 29-year-old fell to her death from a highrise balcony while police were inside the home, a coroner’s inquest heard Wednesday.

Doreen Gayle, who lived next door to Korchinski-Paquet and her family, told a police watchdog agency what she remembered of May 27, 2020 in an interview less than a week after the fatal fall. The roughly 50-minute recording was played on the second day of the inquest.

Gayle said both Korchinski-Paquet and her mother, Claudette Beals, had come by her apartment to chat and smoke in the morning.

Hours later, she told the Special Investigations Unit, Beals came back, asking her to break up a fight between Korchinski-Paquet and her 26-year-old brother, Reece Korchinski — something Gayle said she’d had to do multiple times in the past. She didn’t know what triggered the fight, but said Korchinski-Paquet often got “angry” after experiencing seizures and she’d had two that morning.

The two women rushed next door and found Korchinski had his sister in a chokehold on the bed, trying to restrain her as she struggled, Gayle said. He told them the fight started because his sister broke his TV, she said, adding it took a few minutes to pull them apart.

“He let go of his sister and he says, ‘Mom, look what’s going to happen. She’s gonna go get knives’ — exactly what happened,” she said.

Korchinski-Paquet “went straight to the kitchen” and grabbed two knives, she said. Gayle, who had told the family to go to her unit, stopped Korchinski-Paquet in the hallway before deciding she’d had enough, she told the SIU.

She went back to her apartment and stayed with Korchinski’s girlfriend and their children, she said. Soon after, Korchinski came in and flung a chair, breaking a lamp, she said.

“I got mad and I said, all of you, leave,” she said, adding she locked the door behind them.

When they came to her door again later that day, it was to share the devastating news, she said.

“I saw Reece and he said: ‘Regis went over the balcony,'” she said. “I couldn’t understand and then I saw them crying.”

Gayle told the SIU she didn’t know what happened after the family left her apartment, and choked up as she recalled chatting and laughing with Korchinski-Paquet earlier that day. “She didn’t have to die so tragically,” she said.

The two households were close like family, with Gayle offering her apartment as refuge whenever arguments broke out next door, she said. Between Korchinski-Paquet’s state after her seizures and the presence of her brother, his girlfriend and their children, “it was a volatile situation,” she said.

The inquest has heard Korchinski-Paquet had a long history of seizures from epilepsy, often followed by confusion, aggressive behaviour and temporary amnesia.

She had two seizures the morning of the day she died. Police were called in the late afternoon over a “rapidly developing and violent family disturbance that involved knives,” the inquest heard.

Five calls were made to 911, three of them by Korchinski-Paquet, the inquest heard. Those calls are expected to be played for the jury, along with CCTV footage from the hallway outside the apartment.

Six police officers and two paramedics responded to the calls.

Gayle wasn’t clear on the timeline of what she described to the SIU, but said Beals took her phone when she came to ask for help and used it to call 911. The phone’s logs showed a call to 911 at 2:27 p.m. and another at 5:13 p.m., she said in the interview.

Investigators asked her if Korchinski-Paquet had ever walked between their balconies in the past, and Gayle said she hadn’t. Beals and Korchinski, however, had previously gone over the part connecting the two balconies to get into their unit when they were locked out, but they never went over the outside railing, she said. Gayle said that was no longer possible since her balcony now had netting to repel pigeons.

The inquest also heard the agency’s interview with a bystander who saw Korchinski-Paquet holding on to the outside of the balcony, then after briefly turning away, witnessed the woman fall.

Earlier Wednesday, lawyers representing Korchinski-Paquet’s family, the Black Legal Action Centre, and others who have standing at the inquest questioned a neurologist who examined her records after her death.

Dr. Julien Hébert told the inquest that it would be “nearly impossible” to determine that someone was acting aggressively due to delirium or psychosis after an epilepsy seizure without knowing their medical history.

“If a patient has signs of seizures that could obviously alert one to the possibility of postictal psychosis or delirium, but absent that history and absent signs of seizures or psychosis I agree that for a lay person or a police officer it would be … extremely difficult or nearly impossible to distinguish from other causes,” he said in response to a lawyer for the Toronto Police Association.

Hébert said Tuesday that in the years preceding her death, Korchinski-Paquet on several occasions showed symptoms in keeping with postictal delirium or postictal psychosis, both mental states that can occur after seizures.

Her death, which came soon after the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, fuelled protests and revived calls to defund the police. It was also one of several deaths to bring attention to how police respond to calls involving mental health.

The inquest was announced earlier this year and is slated to last 14 days.

Korchinski-Paquet’s mother, father and brother have been named as potential witnesses, as have five of the police officers who attended the scene.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Oct. 14, 2026.

Paola Loriggio, The Canadian Press