SUSPECT OBSESSED WITH GUNS: SOURCES
Admired Trump, Le Pen, report acquaintances
• From a young age, Alexandre Bissonnette was fascinated with guns. As a boy, he would fire a pellet gun in the woods across the street from the house where he was raised in suburban Cap- Rouge, a neighbour recounted Tuesday. As a young teen, he joined the Cadets, where marksmanship is an important part of the training.
But it was later when his passion for firearms combined with right- wing extremist ideology that the fuse was allegedly lit for a rampage that left six worshippers dead in a Quebec City mosque Sunday evening.
Eric Debroise met Bissonnette late last year when a mutual friend brought him along to a regular political discussion that Debroise hosts at a pub near Université Laval.
Bissonnette was keen to talk about Marine Le Pen, the far- right French politician. On Facebook, Bissonnette declared himself a fan of Le Pen, as well as of U. S. President Donald Trump. Debroise said his informal group includes people of various political persuasions, but nobody was interested in hearing praise of the anti- immigrant Front National leader who had visited Quebec earlier in the year.
Debroise described Bissonnette, 27, as unremarkable and unthreatening. “He was very introverted, someone who was pretty quiet,” he said. The one subject that he spoke of with real interest was hunting.
“We understood that he was a hunter and that he had guns,” Debroise said.
“It was something he was passionate about. He liked hunting l arge game, l i ke moose or bear.”
After joining the discussion group once or twice, Bissonnette didn’t return after the Christmas holidays. And he also appears to have cut off ties with even his closest friend.
It was Bissonnette’s best friend since childhood who took him along to Debroise’s event. The friend, who did not respond to an interview request, contributes to a website Gauchedroitistan, which has a reputation for airing right- wing, anti- feminist discourse, but Debroise said the friend was stunned when he learned Bissonnette had been arrested for Sunday’s massacre.
Debroise said he spoke to the friend on Monday, and he was in shock. Bissonnette had not been answering the friend’s calls or responding to his texts for the past month. “He is in the same situation as someone who has been married for a long time and discovers their spouse is a pedophile,” Debroise said of the friend.
A similar shock is being felt on the quiet street in a western suburb where Bissonnette grew up with his twin brother, Mathieu. The pair l ast summer moved out into an apartment in Sainte- Foy, close to Université Laval, where Alexandre studied.
Nobody answered t he door Tuesday at the twostorey family home with white siding and black shutters. A bouquet of carnations sat on the doorstep with a card addressed to Mr. and Mrs. Bissonnette.
Chantal Masson, a neighbour who has a child the same age as Bissonnette, described him as a wellbehaved boy raised by loving parents. “It’s a shock for everyone in the neighbourhood,” she said. “For his parents it must be horrible.”
Rejean Bussières, who lives across the street from the Bissonnettes, said his son played with Alexandre when they were children. But when Alexandre hit his teen years and became obsessed with guns and violent films, his son stopped hanging out with him. They went to the same high school, where Bussières said Bissonnette was the target of bullies.
He said his son described Alexandre as strange, and when a police c ar was parked in front of his house Monday morning, he immediately feared it had something to do with the mosque shootings that had been on the news.
“I said, ‘ I hope it’s not Alexandre.’ Then the police went to their house and I thought, ‘ He’s the killer.’ ”
Bissonnette f aces six charges of first- degree murder and five of attempted murder in connection with the shootings at the Centre Culturel Islamique de Québec.
A police source told La Presse t hat Bissonnette did not hide his hatred for Muslims when he was questioned following his arrest. A group established to welcome Syrian refugees to Quebec City said Bissonnette was an offensive social-media presence.
He was well known among activists on the left “for his stances in defence of Quebec’s identity, pro- Le Pen and anti- feminist,” the group said in a Facebook posting.
At the apartment where Bissonnette lived since last summer, other residents said he was not particularly friendly but mostly unremarkable. Samuel Gagnon remembered holding the outside door open for Bissonnette once as he entered with groceries. “He just went in and said nothing, his hood up,” he said.
His new apartment is about a kilometre away from the mosque, and on Sunday Bissonnette is alleged to have arrived there a little before 8 p.m. Within minutes, according to the charges against him, he was transformed from an antisocial gun lover and rightwing social- media troll to a mass murderer.
FOR HIS PARENTS IT MUST BE HORRIBLE.