A mother’s love: Ex-diplomat spent life savings to free son
A Canadian diplomat in a nightmare in Miami spent nearly every cent she had, took out multiple loans and sold her Ottawa house to finance a legal bid to bring her teenage son home after felony murder charges.
Roxanne Dubé’s life changed in March 2015.
It was a crime — and punishment — that shook two cities and thrust Dubé and her family into the spotlight.
Just weeks after her two sons settled into a new life in Miami to join Dubé at her posting as consul general, the teens’ names and faces were splashed across newspapers and television screens. One was dead, the other in jail.
Dubé’s first-born was one of two teenagers fatally shot after a botched drug robbery. Her surviving son was jailed and charged with murder for being a party to the crime that took his brother’s life, even though he fired no gun.
What followed was an 18-month legal saga that cost Dubé her life savings to free her surviving son.
Now, a recent spousal support decision provides a glimpse into the financial crisis that left Dubé more than $125,000 in debt and how she and her since freed son are doing after the ordeal of a lifetime.
Jean Wabafiyebazu, 18, and his then 14-year-old brother Marc moved to Miami in January 2015. Their mother, Dubé, a rising star in the diplomacy, had just taken the position of consul general of Canada in Florida.
On March 30, the brothers took their mother’s BMW with diplomatic plates to an apartment in what U.S. police alleged was a plot to rob a drug dealer. Whether Marc knew about his older brother’s plan would later be a central issue at his murder trial.
Prosecutors said Jean and a Miami teen, Joshua Wright, 17, killed each other in a gunfight during the botched ripoff of 800 grams of marijuana from drug dealer Anthony Rodriguez.
Marc, who had turned 15 just two weeks prior, was waiting in the car. But under Florida’s “felony” law, a party to any crime can bear the full legal responsibility for it. The unarmed boy, who insisted he didn’t know what was going to happen, was charged with first-degree murder for the crime that claimed his brother’s life. If convicted, he’d face one of two penalties: life in prison or death.
What followed was what Superior Court Justice Julie Audet, the family court judge, called a “highly mediatized” legal case. While its ins and outs were largely reported, the financial toll on Dubé went untold. Dubé initially went on leave from her diplomatic position, then was replaced altogether. She left her diplomatic residence. But since she had to stay in Miami for her son’s trial, she began renting a new place. Costs started to mount.
Nearly $15,000 to bury her dead son. About $215,000 for three lawyers on the case to free Marc; $1,800 a month for her rent; about $500 a month for Marc’s care while in state custody. All the while still paying her children’s father, Germano Wabafiyebazu, $2,400 in spousal support.
Dubé sold her Ottawa house, took out a $45,000 line of credit, took a $40,000 loan from her employer, borrowed $28,500 on credit cards and asked family and friends for personal loans.
Marc struck a deal with prosecutors in February 2016, pleading “no contest” to lesser charges of third-degree murder, aggravated battery and attempted armed robbery. Pleading no contest resolved the matter in the eyes of the court, which then could dole out punishment for the offences. But technically, Marc admitted no guilt.
Marc received a conditional sentence. If he completed in-custody boot camp, house arrest and a term of probation served in the U.S., he’d have no criminal record.
In September 2016, Marc was quietly deported to Canada after a jurisdictional fight between U.S. federal immigration authorities and the state court that sentenced him. Federal officials wanted him deported to Canada and state officials wouldn’t do so without a Florida judge’s approval.
Dubé faced harsh criticism from onlookers who said her diplomatic status and wealth gave Marc a get-out-of-jail-free card. Even the presiding judge and prosecutor felt the plea deal, once signed, had been made under misleading conditions, with Dubé intending to whisk her boy away to Canada at the first opportunity. Dubé has denied those claims.
Dubé is now director general of the Canadian Foreign Service Institute at the department of Global Affairs Canada, earning an annual income of $148,000.
According to his mother’s application to family court, Marc has “successfully adjusted to the severe trauma that he has undergone.” He completed U.S. courtordered boot camp in Miami with “great success.” After returning to Ottawa in September 2016, Marc received his high school diploma in December 2016 and now attends Algonquin College, where he is enrolled in a business program. He had first toyed with the idea of being a law clerk.
Dubé cashed most of the boys’ educational savings plans to pay for lawyers in Miami. There was enough money left to pay for Marc’s first year in college.
The financial toll on Dubé constituted such a change in material circumstances that a family court judge more than halved her spousal support payments to Germano.
In November, Dubé asked the court to effectively terminate her alimony obligations. She argued “depletion of all of her assets, coupled with her obligation to service the debts she incurred as a result of the children’s tragic circumstances of 2015 and her being the sole provider for Marc, leave her with no ability to continue to support” her former partner of 24 years.
Germano had suggested to the court that Dubé file for bankruptcy so she could give priority to paying spousal support over her debt.
Justice Julie Audet found “bankruptcy might very well compromise (Dubé’s) ability to remain employed with the federal government, and the loss of her employment would be dramatic for this family, more particularly for Marc.”
Court documents detail what the judge called Dubé’s “frugal lifestyle.”
“There is no money available or spent on restaurants, vacations, entertainment or other such luxuries.”
Dubé currently rents a duplex where she and Marc live.
The so-called lavish life of Canadian boys born into a diplomatic family that saw them enrolled in private schools is now, for Marc, marked by necessity and frugality.
The events took a toll, too, on the boys’ father, he said. While he had not financially supported them after the separation or paid a cent to cover funeral costs, legal bills or Marc’s education, Germano, who has been steadily unemployed for years, told the court the stress of Jean’s death and uncertainty of Marc’s criminal charges led him to lose control of his diabetes and suffer permanent damage to his eyesight. He is nearly blind.
Germano’s main asset was the family home in Rothwell Heights. He refused to sell it for years, saying that in Angola — his homeland in southern Africa — it is important to leave a financial legacy for your children. Germano wanted to leave the house to Marc after his own death.
The judge thought this was foolish given the dire circumstances Marc faced. “While I acknowledge the respondent’s desire to leave a legacy to his son, Marc’s needs when he was incarcerated and his current need to obtain an education are/were far more important and should have taken precedence.”
Marc’s probation continues in Florida, but in Ottawa he is just a college student. However, should he violate the conditions of his probation, he could still be jailed.
Dubé would not comment on the spousal support decision or on her and Marc’s second chance in Canada. Dubé told the Citizen she is writing a book in which she hopes to tell her side of a complicated story. There is no estimated timeline for its publication. She has her son’s full support as Marc begins a life out of the limelight.
“It’s no longer just my story,” she said. It’s his, too.