Varying memories
Memories of alleged N.B. shooter range from unpleasant loner to happy co-worker
Friends and acquaintances of Matthew Raymond are offering varying memories of the accused murderer: a boy who retreated into video games, a pleasant supermarket co-worker, and an increasingly isolated loner in later years.
Childhood friends have clear recollections of a boy who often preferred to be by himself, playing video games rather than socializing with other children.
However, others recall a pleasant, middle-aged co-worker who smiled as he came to work at a Fredericton supermarket, cheerfully toting his bicycle helmet.
The 48-year-old man is accused of firing down upon four people from his apartment window with a long gun, killing two civilians as they loaded a car for a trip and two police officers who responded to the scene on Friday morning.
Beth Hoyt, a Fredericton woman who grew up with Raymond in the city’s south side, says the generally “happy and quiet boy” would come outside and play street hockey, baseball, bike riding or whatever else was going on in the neighbourhood.
Still, the 46-year-old woman also recalled clearly that Raymond’s mother was concerned that her son preferred to be back inside playing video games rather than in the fresh air.
“It’s just that his mother was always saying, ‘I wish he’d get out of the basement, stop playing (video) games and do more outside,’” she said in a telephone interview. “He would come and play for awhile but then he would be right back by himself. She wanted more of the happy times for him.”
Hoyt had limited contact with Raymond after she graduated from Fredericton High School, but in adulthood, Hoyt said she briefly found Raymond to be a good employee.
She hired him to assemble bicycles in a retail store, and “there was never a problem during that.”
More recently, Hoyt would pass him at a coffee shop where he was sitting and talking to friends, and he would greet her in a friendly way.
Jim Whelan, Hoyt’s boyfriend, worked with Raymond at an Atlantic Superstore in Fredericton about eight years ago.
He said he had generally found Raymond to be a pleasant co-worker who came into work smiling.
He said that Raymond had often mentioned he played video games, including Call of Duty, a video game franchise that includes shooting.
However, neither he nor Hoyt said they experienced discomfort around Raymond in the years they encountered him.
“I’m shocked. I don’t know what happened. You wonder what is going on,” said Whelan.
The issue of video game use often emerges when media cover violent deaths, say psychologists who caution against drawing links to criminal activity.
The American Psychological Association issued a public statement in 2015 saying the existing quantitative research didn’t show a clear link between excessive viewing of violent video games and criminal violence.
Chris Ferguson, an associate professor and co-chairman of the Department of Psychology at Stetson University, said some psychologists also dispute that there are any links between violent video games and aggression toward others.
“Long-term outcome studies of youth do not typically find that violent media consumption is a predictor of delinquency, conduct disorder or other antisocial outcomes. We just published a longitudinal study with kids as young as eight, that found no evidence for effects,” he wrote in an email.
Others who have commented publicly about Raymond say in more recent years there’s evidence of him growing more reclusive and occasionally unpleasant.