One son shot dead, another son charged
Canadian diplomat and mother speaks of healing shattered life
The unease Canada’s top diplomat in Miami was feeling as her car threaded its way to work that bright, warm morning was becoming more insistent. Her phone rang. “Are your kids OK?” a senior official at Canada’s Embassy in Washington was asking.
“And then,” Roxanne Dubé says in her French-accented lilt, “I knew something was not correct.”
As she would later discover, local authorities had contacted the U.S. State Department, which had in turn contacted the Canadian Embassy. Her unease turned to alarm as, at the urging of her embassy contact, she directed her driver to a hospital, where she was ushered into a VIP room. Someone handed her a phone number to call for information. She did.
“I’m afraid I have bad news, I think we should meet,” Det. Rolando Garcia was saying. “And he said, ‘Jean is dead.’ I knew it was true because of the way he pronounced Jean’s name.”
Dubé dropped the phone. Her world had imploded that sunny day on March 31, 2015. Dubé could barely stagger outside.
Now 53, Dubé had arrived from Ottawa with her two teen sons exactly two months earlier to take up her post as Canada’s consul general in Miami. It had been a whirlwind of wrapping up her old job — she had been director general for North America, helping oversee Canada’s consular network in the United States and Mexico — finding housing, moving, unpacking, getting the boys settled in school.
“I needed a wife, basically,” she says. “That’s what I needed. It was very demanding.”
Dubé had thought little of it when her 18-year-old son, Jean Wabafiyebazu, had asked for money to buy a textbook and take his younger brother, Marc Wabafiyebazu, 15, to a restaurant and movie. The older teen had been doing well and she thought he could do with a reward. She gave him $80 and allowed them to use her black BMW, its diplomatic licence plate sporting the word “Consul,” because Jean’s car, which she now drives, was in the shop that day. Instead, that March 30 afternoon, the brothers headed to a dingy apartment, Jean’s math homework in a black Jansport backpack on the back seat. He was carrying an American-made .40-calibre Smith and Wesson handgun. His plan, police would allege, was to rob a drug dealer of about 800 grams of marijuana.
Jean left Marc sitting in the passenger seat, nearby trees waving in the breeze, as he went into the apartment clutching a green duffel bag emblazoned with a Moosehead beer logo and the words Jean/Marc written in fading ink. Inside, Jean and Anthony Rodriguez, then 19, had a back and forth, according to court evidence, along the lines of “Show me the money,” “Show me the drugs.” And then, it went horribly wrong. Within minutes, Jean and another teen, Joshua Wright, 17, had died in an exchange of gunfire. Jean had been shot three times, including in the head. Rodriguez, a bullet wound to his arm, would tell police that he picked up a handgun as he bolted into the sunshine, stopping only to rush back inside to retrieve his drugs. His green iPhone was left inside in a pool of blood.
Outside, an agitated and distraught Marc Wabafiyebazu could only watch as Rodriguez drove off to abandon his silver Chevy Malibu at a gas station — the same place he had been arrested a month earlier with a loaded gun for drug trafficking. Police had released him without charge two weeks before Jean’s death. Minutes after the dealer’s hasty exit, police ordered Marc to his knees and arrested him on the sidewalk as they swarmed the bloody, casing-riddled crime scene.
For hours, Marc was left in an interrogation room, handcuffed to a chair. No one read him his rights or warned him about the perils of speaking to the officers. Investigators refused his pleas to call his mother, who would go to bed about 10 p.m. wondering why she couldn’t reach her kids, but assuming that their phone batteries had died or that they were in a movie theatre and had turned their devices off.
In court the following day, the judge gave Dubé, now stricken with the knowledge her elder son was dead, 30 seconds to hug her bereft, defeated younger son.
“He said, ‘Jean est mort, Jean est mort.’ And I said, ‘We’re going to be brave now,’” she says. “I couldn’t grieve for Jean at that point. There was no space.”
Most pressing for Dubé was ensuring that Marc survived. The brothers had developed an extraordinarily close bond through their mother’s various postings and moves, including a stint as ambassador to Zimbabwe that began in 2005. More of a pliant follower, Marc kept saying he didn’t know if he could live without his brother. In the gloom of the courtroom that day, Dubé realized she had to shape up for her boy’s sake.
Neither police nor prosecutors would allege Marc shot or even threatened anyone. Surveillance video at the two-storey apartment complex backs that up. But based on a purported confession he gave over a couple of minutes from the back seat of a cruiser to a rookie officer who was driving, police alleged Marc was in on his brother’s planned armed robbery of the drug dealer. If Marc was a party to the botched robbery, he was, under Florida’s felony law, culpable in the killings.
Even though he had turned 15 a mere two weeks earlier and had never been in trouble with the law, Marc would be formally indicted as an adult on seven charges, including felony first-degree murder, with its maximum sentence of life behind bars. Also charged separately with third-degree felony murder were the 21-year-old tenant of the apartment where the shooting happened, which police described as a filthy drug den, and Rodriguez, who had turned himself in. Both coaccused would soon be granted bail and later plead out to lesser marijuana drug charges in exchange for boot-camp sentences and probation. The man who admitted to brokering the deal — he arrived at the scene in his dad’s shiny gold Cadillac and fled unhurt when the shooting started — was never charged.
At Marc’s bail hearing, Dubé buried her face in her hands or dabbed at her eyes as investigators described in gruesome detail how her older son had met his violent end. She listened as they described her younger son’s arrest, interrogation and confession. And then, as a witness, Dubé found herself impugned as a negligent mother who had failed to properly supervise her teenaged offspring. The judge would later lend an official stamp of approval to the jaundiced view of Dubé as a parent by stating that a desperate mother might resort to desperate measures to spare her son a lengthy prison term and, given her status as a diplomat, that made the child a flight risk. In addition, Circuit Court Judge Teresa Pooler decided the mother could not be trusted to supervise him properly. Despite being the only juvenile charged in the case, Marc was the only one denied bail pending trial.
Almost a year later, Dubé is still piecing together the shards of her life. At times, she talks with confidence and an unabashed optimism. Other moments, she is clearly close to tears. She stepped down as consul general last August, but remains a Canadian government employee on sick leave. “Everything is completely different,” she allows. “Everything has changed.”
The unfathomable grief at losing Jean, she says, has begun subsiding. As evidence, she says, she can now look at the many photographs she has of her elder son, smile and say to herself, “Wow, it was a blast for those 18 years.”
“I have almost a sense of joy. That he’s with me. He’s with Marc, and he will live through us. He has managed to tell me somehow that this was meant to happen and he’s OK.”
Dealing with the guilt has taken a lot longer.
When a child falls ill, the usual reaction from others is one of sympathy. When a child is accused of being a criminal, Dubé would soon learn, a more common reaction is that the parents must have somehow failed. It is, she came to understand, a way for parents to protect themselves, to be able to declare privately that something that awful could never happen to their kids.
“You really feel the blows,” she says, growing quiet.
A counsellor’s words offered another revelation: focus on what she had done right as a mother and show herself compassion for any mistakes she might have made. It was a pivotal turning point on the winding path to healing.
“It was a very long road to go from ‘I am a bad mother’ to ‘I have made mistakes.’ And there’s a difference between the two.”
A French-Canadian raised in Quebec, Dubé had put herself through university before working for a decade on Parliament Hill for a prominent MP who became foreign affairs minister. Her boys’ dad, Germano Wabafiyebazu, was a Congolese refugee who came to Canada in 1992. They met at the University of Ottawa in ’93. She was in her early 30s when Jean was born. Marc, the “son every mother would want to have,” followed a couple of years later. The photographs spread out on her dining room table show the smiling siblings in various stages of childhood.
Jean had done well in school. He was popular, athletic, smart. Dubéand his father, from whom she separated after her tour as ambassador to Zimbabwe, loved him. They had been strong, supportive, hard-working role models. She had done all the right mom things. She drove him everywhere. They talked. And yet he had drifted into a rougher crowd in Ottawa and had started dabbling in drugs, apparently more with the notion of selling them than using them.
“He wanted money. He wanted to be rich quickly,” she says. “He knew what he was doing.”
Jean had been arrested in Ottawa on a minor drug-possession charge. He talked of dropping out of high school. Dubé and his father sat him down to talk about what was happening with him. He agreed to change schools, away from what they considered the bad influence of his older friends. He wept in embarrassment. “He knew we wanted the best for him,” she says.
But there was something yet deeper that Dubé now faults herself for not recognizing: Jean was in the throes of a biracial identity crisis. The son of a black father and white mother, he had started bumping up against the negative views too many people hold of black youth. It destabilized him, she says. She found it difficult reaching out to family or friends for help in dealing with a troubled, independent-minded son she wanted to protect. In retrospect, she says, she had become isolated as a parent and should have done more to find help.
“He needed help and I needed help. He could have been saved.”
Marc, she says, was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. He knows he should not have been there. But what’s equally clear is that he did not commit murder or even an armed robbery. “He did not participate in the felony. He was sitting in the car in the passenger seat, no means of communicating with his brother, unarmed.”
Still, rather than submit to the vagaries of a trial at which his co-accused would testify against him, and the potentially severe consequences of a conviction, Marc pleaded no contest on Friday to four charges, including two counts of third-degree felony murder — one for his brother’s death — as well as aggravated battery.
After grilling Dubé on whether she would properly supervise her son, Judge Pooler accepted the plea along with the jointly recommended sentence of boot camp, modified house arrest and up to eight years of probation. Crucially, if he completes the sentence without incident, he will have no criminal conviction.
“Essentially, he is paying the price for Jean,” Dubé says.
It’s been tough, Dubé says reflectively. She still doesn’t have her car back from police. Her surviving son is still not home. But Marc has been doing well, although forced to grow up faster than they might have wished.
In his fellow inmates, he has seen first-hand the consequences of parental neglect, abuse and cripplingly broken homes. He speaks with compassion about them, she says. If she has grown as a mother, so has her son. Jean is long buried in Ottawa. He was, his mom says, fiercely protective of his only sibling. At Marc’s request, his tombstone carries this epitaph:
“Forever my brother’s keeper.”