A TRIBUTE TO CHANCE
Batting cage to honour slain teen who found passion, peace in sports
The kids in Windsor Central Little League at Memorial Park could finally get a batting cage. It won’t be just a batting cage. It will be named after Chance Gauthier, the boy who found passion — and a measure of peace — in sports.
League president Donna Standel was at work several weeks ago when Kim Gauthier called her and told her about Chance. Baseball, broomball, badminton — there wasn’t a sport Gauthier’s 16-year-old son didn’t play. Then Gauthier told Standel what happened to Chance, that he was found shot to death, that people donated thousands of dollars in his memory, that Chance would want that money to go to the league, which had just been robbed.
“We cried,” said Standel. “It was a very emotional conversation.” So on May 28, the day Chance would have turned 17, Gauthier donated $3,000 to the league. It will go toward a long-awaited batting cage.
Gauthier was making dinner for her grandchildren on Feb. 14 when she glanced out the window of her modest but neat home on Wyandotte Street East and saw them approaching.
“Oh my God,” she said. “The police are here.”
The detectives knocked on the door.
“We’re here about Chance,” they told her.
“They said we believe he’s missing, and we need to find him,” Gauthier remembered. She had read about a body that was found that day.
“Does it have anything to do with the body that was found?” she asked.
They didn’t answer. They just repeated that they needed to find him.
The Gauthiers contacted Chance’s friends. They couldn’t find him.
The next morning, the detectives called Gauthier twice, again asking if she knew where he was. Then they asked for his dental records.
“Prepare yourself,” her brother, a retired police officer, advised her.
Then the detectives called her oldest son, 29-year-old Kalem, and asked him to arrange for the family to come to the police station.
Flanked by her husband, Scott, and employer and family friend Dr. Abdullah Aboulisayen, she watched as the detectives opened their file.
“And there it was,” she remembered.
A photo of Chance.
It was his body that had been found, lying face down in an alley in the 900 block of Church Street at about 7 a.m. on Valentine’s Day. He had been shot in the head.
He was identified using dental records.
Mal Chol, 20, of Waterloo, was charged three days later with first degree murder, kidnapping and forcible confinement. An arrest warrant was issued for a second man, 20-year-old Nouraldin Rabee, but he is believed to have fled the area. “His death rocked our world,” said Gauthier. “Even now,
I keep asking, why? Did he suffer? Could we have saved him? It’s hard. It’s really hard.” Chance struggled his entire, short life.
He was diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and oppositional defiant disorder. He also suffered anxiety. He had been taking medication since he was six. He saw a psychiatrist regularly. The Gauthiers got him a dog because they were told that would help. Chance named it Buddy. Still, his brain seemed to function at high speed all the time. He couldn’t concentrate. He had difficulty sleeping. He would put on his soccer uniform three hours before a game and spend the rest of the time restless and fidgeting. He also had a learning disability and required help at school. He thought he couldn’t do anything right.
“He really struggled with mental health,” Gauthier said. “He just wanted to be accepted, to be loved.”
A year-and-a-half ago, with Chance difficult to handle, his medication difficult to afford and unable to access some programs and facing waiting lists for others, the Gauthiers agreed to give custody of Chance to the Children’s Aid Society.
“It was a very difficult decision as a parent to make,” Gauthier said. “But we wanted what was best for him.”
His family still saw him all the time.
And Chance had better access to help. Last fall, he spent more than three months at Wendigo Lake, an alternative program for troubled youth.
He returned home just before Christmas, and the Gauthiers regained custody of him. He seemed better. He wanted to finish school and enrolled in St. Joseph’s. Kalem promised he would take Chance on a trip if he graduated.
Throughout all his challenges, Chance had turned to sports. “The only thing that kept him grounded was sports,” said Gauthier.
Trophies, medals and team photos still line the shelves in his bedroom. There’s a photo of him holding a lacrosse stick, a large banner with dozens of patches he earned bowling, a canoe paddle he carved. There are banners from the Windsor Spitfires and New England Patriots and a University of Michigan wolverines paw.
If he had a bad day, he’d head to the end of Strabane Avenue to fish.
“He fished to calm himself,” said Gauthier.
He wasn’t just a gifted athlete. He had the gift of character. Gauthier was at the funeral home when a man approached her. He told her how he used to drop his two children off at the skateboard park in Tecumseh, where Chance skateboarded. He told her how Chance befriended his kids and taught them skateboarding. Then he offered to pay for part of the funeral.
“My children adored your son,” he told her, “and I want to do this.”
When he was in Brennan High School’s soccer academy in Grade 9, he used to help the kids in the hockey academy tie their skates.
“That’s the Chance we knew,” said Gauthier. “He had massive friends, and he would always think of them before himself.”
After Christmas, Chance decided he wanted to have his own apartment. Gauthier counselled patience, but Chance, as always, was impatient.
“He didn’t know how to take little steps,” she said.
He was too young to live on his own — unless it was set up through the CAS. So Chance returned to the CAS. While the CAS tried to find an apartment for him, he stayed one night at the Mission, another at a friend’s. He called his parents on Feb. 12 and asked them to bring him something. Then he called them again and told them he had to go out.
“That was the last time we talked to him,” said Gauthier. Police told the media that Chance “frequented” downtown, that he and the accused knew each other, and it was a “targeted” shooting. It fuelled speculation about a drug crime. That hurt.
“I’m not saying he was an angel, because he wasn’t,” said Gauthier. “But you get someone who’s vulnerable, who wants to be friends — they get pulled into things.”
He’d tell her about some people, “Mom, those aren’t my friends.”
She’d tell him, “You have to make better choices.”
“The next thing you know, he’d be at that party,” she said. But, she said, “I never in a million years thought I’d be burying my son because he was shot.” He smoked marijuana. He said it calmed him more than his medication. He took change from cars. But the speculation his murder fuelled?
“This is not who he was.” Some of his friends have told her he was protecting someone. Police say there is no new information about the case. Gauthier has been told little. “You just have to let them do their job, trust they’ll do their job to the best of their ability,” she says.
She keeps the last photo she has of Chance, taken during a family outing to Springz, on her phone and says good night to him every night. She goes to grief counselling.
“I have my meltdowns,” she said.
But it’s comforting that the money people donated when Chance died will be used to ensure that kids can “play the sports that he absolutely loved.” And a batting cage named after him — “he would be so proud,” she said.