People kill for many reasons, all of them different, and all of them legitimate, I bet, in the minds of the killer. But maybe what links them all is that feeling of power at that very moment where their actions end in murder? The sense of control and power that they hold over their victim; I’m sure this is always the same.
In the space of sixty-seconds, ten years and one month ago from when this is being written, Constable Jean-Loup Lapointe, a white cop who was just 18 months away from graduating from the Police Academy, got out of his police car and fired his gun four times at a group of men of Honduran descent at Henri-Bourassa Park.
When it was over, 18-year-old Denis Meas and Jeffrey Sagor-Météllus, 20, lay wounded, one shot in the arm and the other in the back, while Dany Villanueva’s younger brother, 18-year-old Fredy Villanueva, lay close to death on the ground of the parking lot, after having been shot twice. The bullets had tumbled and spun inside him, according to Wikipedia, perforating his stomach and causing lacerations to the inferior vena cava, the left lobe of his liver and his pancreas. It was no surprise that at 21:45 that night he was pronounced dead in the operating room of Hôpital Sacre-Coeur, and the short life of Fredy Villanueva came to an end.
On the tenth anniversary of his murder, a ceremony was held in Parc de L’Espoir, but he was never mentioned by name, which angered some and confirmed to others that nothing had changed here in this city where racial profiling, or carding as it’s called here, always has and always will exist. But if one thing came from it, said activist Will Prosper, was that the shooting sparked a conversation about police brutality in the area.
“Lots of people believe he punched a police officer”, Prosper would say, "and it’s just not true. Even the coroner’s inquest said he was an honest citizen, doing his thing. We should remember his memory.”
No doubt to Lapointe, Dany didn’t look like the quiet guy next door who kept to himself; he didn’t look like a real family man who coached the little league or preached in church. He didn’t look like one of the good guys, and that’s why it was so easy for him to pull the trigger so many times.
Is killing someone over an argument about a band any worse than killing an unarmed honest citizen just doing his thing? Aren’t both people just cold blooded murderers?
Well, no, because Constable Jean-Loup Lapointe wasn’t ever charged for his murder. He’s free, ten years later, to carry on with his life. I’m guessing that Raymond Muller will see his freedom disappear along with his family and the friends he shared with Gagnon. His good-guy card will be revoked, and the quiet man, the family man who kept to himself, will be simply replaced with an image of a monster.
Just like all those other monsters who don't live in their community. Muller's story, no doubt, will be made into a true crime show that one day I'll watch with my dad in his home five thousand kilometres away in Dudley. We'll revel in the titillating B-movie style production that tells the story of a doomed friendship and of a dismembered body which was never found and we’ll both end up asking ourselves, why didn't he just clean up after himself?
6/7