(Face of a crazy man, or just a Canadian?)

It looks like former UFC fighter Harold Howard’s crazy behavior this past December, that landed him in jail for the next five years wasn’t a totally out of the blue occurrence. The Toronto Star is reporting today that a couple weeks before the incident that saw Howard launch an unprovoked hammer attack on his nephew and sister, whom he had been staying with since October after he was charged with assaulting his wife, he had visited the newspaper’s offices in the hopes that they would expose an X-Files-like plot against him.

From the report:

“On Dec. 9, 2009, Howard showed up at the Toronto Star with a briefcase. He looked like a businessman, but his clothes were worn, and his knuckles were bruised and caked with dried blood. In a hoarse voice, he said there was a plot to ruin his life. He claimed he had been injected with a liquid that hardened his veins and immobilized him. He held out his shaking hands for inspection, his eyes wide in desperation. As he was escorted out of the building, he left nodding to no one but himself. “On to Plan B,” he told an editor before leaving.

Almost two weeks later, residents of a Niagara Falls street were awakened by screams. Howard was attacking his sister and nephew with the claw end of a hammer. His 21-year-old nephew fought back before Howard screeched out of the driveway.”

His estranged wife, who says that Howard has been addicted to pain killers for several years and was using them casually prior to his brief stint in the Octagon to alleviate pain from a back injury, explained that only in recent months had he become mentally unstable as a result of his overuse of a combination of Oxycocet, Gabapentin, and sleeping pills.

She explains that his demeanor and personality began to become increasingly more strange in the weeks leading up to the assault on her and that he started accusing her of being unfaithful, without any reason other than the fact that she had done something different with her make-up. He was charged with assault after he kicked her in the thigh, causing a large bruise.

She’s lucky it wasn’t one of Howard’s patented windmill kicks, or we wouldn’t be reading her comments today.