Steve Fonyo may have permanent brain injury from home invasion

WATCH: It’s unclear if Steve Fonyo will ever recover from a serious attack. It’s been more than a month since he was assaulted in his Surrey home. As Jeremy Hunka reports, his family has revealed he suffered a brain injury and only recently came out of a coma.

A month after he was beaten up and stabbed, Steve Fonyo is able to breathe on his own and eat food.

However, there are signs that his recovery may take much longer than expected due to a brain injury.

“His eyes are rolling, his speech is slurred. He asks questions like ‘where am I?’, and then a few minutes later he asks the same question,” says his sister Suzanne Main, who visited him for the first time since the attack this weekend.

“He said ‘you know I was stabbed?’, and I said ‘yeah Steve, I know you were stabbed.'”

The brain injury has prevented investigators from talking to Fonyo about the violent home invasion that happened in his Surrey home. Three men stormed through his doorway on February 13, in what police are describing as a targeted assault.

Fonyo first became known to Canadians in 1985, when he ran across the country to raise money for cancer research. In the decades since, he’s had several convictions for assault and theft and had his Order of Canada stripped.

Now, his family is just hoping for a full recovery.

“I am optimistic that he will recover. We don’t know how the brain is going to repair itself,” says Main.

“I’m hoping it will be sooner rather than later.”