Police charge 48-year-old Fredericton man with four counts of first-degree murder,
Alleged shooter, 48, remains hospitalized after being shot by police
Police were saying little about the motive behind the multiple murder in Fredericton on Friday, in which a man allegedly fired a long gun from the window of his third-floor apartment, killing four people in a parking lot below.
Matthew Vincent Raymond, 48, is charged with the first-degree murders of Bobbie Lee Wright, 32, Donnie Robichaud, 42, and two Fredericton police officers, Sara Burns, 43, and Robb Costello, 45.
Officials said Raymond was hospitalized and was being treated for serious injuries after being shot by police.
He is to remain in custody until he appears in court Aug. 27, police said.
Martin Gaudet, deputy police chief in Fredericton, said investigators had yet to find a link between the victims and the accused that would explain a motive for the shooting.
“That link has not been established yet. And that is a piece of information that we’re looking to establish,” Gaudet said at a news conference Saturday afternoon.
However, friends and relatives of the victims said Wright and Robichaud had just begun a relationship. Raymond and Robichaud were both residents of the apartment complex on Brookside Dr., although they lived in separate buildings, according to Judith Aguilar, an office manager for the complex’s owners.
Aguilar said Raymond had been living in the complex for about four months and was an avid cyclist. He often wore his bike helmet into the office when he went in to pay his rent in cash, she said. “He seemed normal and made small talk every time you saw him. He came in every month to pay rent. He was always polite and pleasant,” Aguilar said Saturday.
In an interview with The Canadian Press, Aguilar said that at one point maintenance workers needed to do some repairs in Raymond’s apartment and he didn’t want them there while he wasn’t present.
“He seemed concerned,” she said. “He said he had an expensive computer and an expensive bike and he didn’t want anyone to be there alone. They didn’t even have to go all the way into the apartment; they were just fixing his door frame at the time.”
She said she didn’t interact with Robichaud much because he didn’t come into the office to make his rent payments, and she did not know if he knew Raymond.
On Saturday morning, the area surrounding the crime scene was cordoned off by yellow tape, but police allowed some shaken residents through to check on their pets. The area remained closed Saturday night, with a mobile police command post on scene.
More than half a dozen bullet holes could be seen in the win- dow of an upper-floor corner apartment, while a second window appeared to have been mostly smashed.
Joe Cartwright, a resident in the building, said all the doors in the complex had been kicked in and one of his cats had escaped.
Cartwright said his girlfriend, Caitlyn Francis, and 4-year-old son had been at home during the shooting, and he had rushed to the scene in a panic once he realized his family could be in danger.
“I’m very torn up,” he said. “I’m not doing very well at all. My girlfriend’s not, my son’s not, so we’re going to go and just try to calm down from this.”
Francis said she had been getting her stepson ready for daycare at 7:10 a.m. when she heard police sirens.
She looked out and saw a po- lice car pull in.
“Not even a minute or two later, I heard the first gunshot,” she said. The next moments were a blur as she focused on keeping her stepson safe and calm as several more shots could be heard, she said.
“I pulled him into my bedroom, got him to lay on the floor back there, tried to play cartoons for him, but he still could hear (the gunshots),” she said.
“There was no playing off what those sounds were. He knew it.”
Robichaud’s cousin, Sean Callahan, said Robichaud had been living in the apartment complex for about three or four months.
“The apartment was his, and his sons would go back and forth between the mother’s house and his house. He was living alone. It was Donnie living by himself,” Callahan said Saturday.
Callahan said he and his cousin were very close, talking on the phone most days. But he hadn’t yet met Robichaud’s new girlfriend.
“I talked to him Thursday … I called him up because I needed a part for my truck, so we were talking about my truck, and then we were talking about him, how happy he is with his girlfriend, that his life’s on track. He was just so happy with everything,” said Callahan.
“There’s nothing bad you can say about the guy. When I got a message yesterday asking me if Donnie got shot, I was like, who in the hell would want to shoot Donnie Robichaud?”
At Saturday’s news conference, Fredericton police Chief Leanne Fitch asked people to be patient with the investigation.
“This is a complex investigation, and it must be thorough in nature. I ask residents not to speculate, … Please let all of our investigators do their work and find the facts that need to be found,” she said. The apartment complex where the four victims were shot is in a suburban part of Fredericton, north of the Saint John River.
The New Brunswick capital has a population of fewer than 60,000; its police force is small and tight-knit.
Fitch said police from around the region started arriving Saturday to give local officers some time off to grieve the loss of Costello and Burns. Burns was married and a mother of three. She was a Fredericton police officer for two years, and had served for two years before that in the auxiliary force.
Costello, a 20-year veteran of the force, had a common-law spouse and four children.