WHAT WENT WRONG WITH GILBERT?
From hopeful to tragic: Death of a Rwandan refugee
In 2009, Gilbert Nshimiyumukiza arrived in Montreal full of optimism. At 22, he was starting a new life, having left Rwanda, where he lived through the genocide and saw his parents gunned down as a sixyear-old boy.
A year later, his refugee claim was accepted, and with the support of friends, family and a church in Town of Mount Royal, he made plans to work as a nurse’s aide so he could arrange to have three brothers join him here.
But the horrors of Rwanda were impossible to leave behind, according to several people who knew him well. He began a descent that ended tragically this year: At the age of 30, he died alone at Sacré Coeur Hospital on May 1, the day after he was shot in the head in an apartment in the AhuntsicCartierville borough.
On the day of the shooting, the Montreal police released a few details, but didn’t publicize anything when Nshimiyumukiza died the next day.
And in July, when two men were arrested in the murder, police released the news, but did not name Nshimiyumukiza as the victim, keeping to police policy.
Confusion ensued for relatives and friends in Montreal, who struggled to confirm that Nshimiyumukiza was indeed dead.
Some of his loved ones in Africa still cling to a belief he is alive, one relative says.
Now, those who knew him are wondering how he went from being a man brimming with energy and plans seven years ago to someone who was murdered, with three known drug dealers accused of killing him.
“When he came to Canada he was very optimistic,” said a relative who agreed to speak on condition his name not be published. The relative lives out west, and kept in touch regularly with Nshimiyumukiza by phone.
He noticed a gradual descent and suspected drug use was to blame.
The relative and others would only speak without being identified because they are fearful of the people Nshimiyumukiza had been keeping company with. A third suspect is still at large.
When he came to Canada he was very optimistic
Over the course of a few years, Nshimiyumukiza went from someone who eagerly sought employment to suddenly stating he had “found a way to make money,” the relative said. What followed were pleas for loans.
“From that conversation, I knew he was in trouble,” said the man, who has worked with troubled youth. The relative told Nshimiyumukiza to join him in Western Canada, but he declined the offer.
“Then he disappeared. He didn’t have a telephone number anymore. His phone calls stopped all of a sudden. We have no idea what has happened. He was a very smart boy (as a child in Rwanda),” the relative said.
Some of Nshimiyumukiza’s closest relatives are reluctant to ask about the homicide because of violence they witnessed in Rwanda. “It is really easy to scare someone who has been through that,” the relative said.
He laments deeply that he lost touch with Nshimiyumukiza, that he knows so little about the last years of his life.
“We don’t know what went wrong with Gilbert,” he said.
Nshimiyumukiza had come to Canada seeking refugee status because he feared his life was in danger in Rwanda.
At the age of six, his parents had been pulled from the family’s home and shot dead by a Hutu paramilitary squad. He and his three brothers ran away and hid until it was safe to return.
Nshimiyumukiza’s father was a Tutsi pastor in their village. In 1994, the genocide took the lives of his father’s side of the family, victims along with the estimated 800,000 Tutsis and Hutu moderates massacred.
Nshimiyumukiza gave testimony that helped to convict about 20 people who murdered his parents and family members. He fled his homeland at 22 because the Hutus who killed his parents were being released from prison.
In 2010, a year into his life here, he told the Montreal Gazette that he had been suffering from frequent dizzy spells: “I have trouble in my mind from when I was a child.”
A close friend of Nshimiyumukiza’s, who had known him in Rwanda and helped him after he arrived in Canada, said he had a hard time adjusting to life here.
Before he’d been here a year, he was admitted to hospital for a mental breakdown.
“He was released with almost no, or very little, follow-up,” the friend said. “He fell through the cracks and wasn’t ready for what awaited him (the cultural differences between life in Montreal and Rwanda). He started self-medicating his paranoia with marijuana.”
The friend noticed a dramatic change in Nshimiyumukiza’s appearance last year. And another Montreal relative said she tried to persuade him to go into drug rehab last year but he refused.
In Canada, Nshimiyumukiza was not the man he had been. He gradually abandoned the deep sense of responsibility he had felt for his surviving family members, including his three brothers, the friend said.
“He was so responsible in Rwanda. He looked after other people and made sure they learned things (like English lessons). I think that when he got here, it was like a vacation for him, that he felt he could start thinking of himself for a change.”
The friend lost touch with Nshimiyumukiza as he began to change. During the summer of 2014, Nshimiyumukiza was arrested for assault and theft and uttering threats. He pleaded guilty to all three charges and was sentenced to five days in jail.
“After that arrest he said he was in with some bad people and wanted to get out,” the woman said. She offered to help Nshimiyumukiza move to another province or to Africa, but he declined the offer. Worse, he told his closest friends and relatives that they, too, might be in danger, she said.
By then, the friend said, Nshimiyumukiza was no longer the proud young man she had met in Rwanda a few years before he made it to Canada. In December, the two friends ran into each other at a métro station. It would be the last time.
“He looked really dishevelled, which was really alarming because he used to really take care of his appearance. He was missing teeth,” she said. “I mean, this is a guy who, when I saw him in Rwanda, and there was mud everywhere, his sneakers were pristine white.”
“It was such a different feeling. He was so different. He used to have this deep belly laugh. I can still hear it. He was a skeleton of himself, a shell of who he once was. He just saw me and we hugged, and he cried. He said: ‘I’ve let you down. I have been no good.’ “
Gone was the man with such a strong sense of innocence that for hours non-stop, he would ride the escalators at Atwater métro station with a young man who had come to Canada with him. Nshimiyumukiza told her he considered it practice for becoming a real Montrealer.
“Gilbert wanted to be able to ride them with his eyes closed,” the friend said. “He said he figured he wouldn’t stand out if he knew how to ride the escalators like a local.”
The two men charged with Nshimiyumukiza’s murder — Nikita Hunt, 27, of Montreal, and Jermaine Gero, 42, of Laval — are scheduled to be in Montreal court on Thursday. A warrant is out for the arrest of a third man charged, Shamora Robertson, 29, of Montreal.
All three men have criminal records that include convictions for drug trafficking or drug possession. Hunt was on probation for cocaine trafficking when he was arrested. Gero served eight years in prison starting in 1996 for the aggravated assault and robbery of a taxi driver in Lachine.