Meredith decision looms amid new allegations
Longtime friend says victim wasn’t a bad person, but had made some bad choices
(Labelle) was really quick to forgive and forget. He was killed like an animal. He died on the street by himself. He didn’t deserve that.
Family and friends gathered Saturday night at the exact spot where Devon Labelle was attacked and killed to remember the slain father of one.
Labelle, 24, known as “D-Loc,” was fatally stabbed Thursday afternoon outside a Jean Coutu pharmacy on Montreal Road. Police have made no arrests in the killing but are looking for several suspects believed to have fled the pharmacy after Labelle’s throat was slit in broad daylight on a busy Vanier corner.
The attacker then tossed the alleged murder weapon in nearby Carillon Park. Investigators believe Labelle was targeted.
The mother of Labelle’s fouryear-old son told the Citizen that Labelle was just walking out of the pharmacy when someone he knew wanted to fight him. Masamba Olimi says she doesn’t know if the man who wielded the knife that killed Labelle followed him to drugstore, but when Labelle was leaving, the man wanted to fight. Labelle didn’t have a weapon on him.
“He didn’t expect this guy to stab him.”
Labelle “was a really good person, a good dad, and he was really trying to be there for his son,” Olimi said.
Labelle and his son spent the day together on Tuesday. On Thursday afternoon, he was dead. And now Olimi doesn’t know when or even how she will explain to their son, Calvin, what’s happened to his “papa.”
“I don’t know how to,” she said, in tears.
Labelle “was really quick to forgive and forget,” Olimi said.
“He was killed like an animal. He died on the street by himself. He didn’t deserve that.”
Labelle was charged last year with a dozen offences related to allegedly pimping and beating an exgirlfriend. For those allegations, he was convicted of two counts of assault; the bulk of the other criminal charges against him were withdrawn. That ex-girlfriend wrote Olimi on Facebook to send a grieving family her condolences.
Olimi feared for her son’s father and his being involved in a dangerous criminal lifestyle.
“That lifestyle, nobody’s safe in that lifestyle. I always told him, ‘Be careful. Get out of it.’ ”
Olimi said Labelle was planning to go back to school in September, just when his son would be starting kindergarten. Labelle had always wanted to be a pilot, and when Olimi was pregnant, he had been accepted into an Algonquin College program to fly but was told that the criminal record he already had at that point would be an obstacle to his ever being hired.
A longtime friend told the Citizen that Labelle wasn’t a bad person but had made some bad choices.
“This is not who he was,” said Myrko E. Coen, who performs and goes by the name M.E.C. Rezarek. “He had a great heart. He was a young man looking for a way out.”
Rezarek, like Labelle, grew up in Lowertown. Labelle’s mother arrived in Ottawa from Texas on Saturday after learning of her son’s killing. Labelle grew up without his father, circumstances Rezarek said were like his own.
“He was a remarkable young man. He had a lot of talent,” Rezarek said. Labelle “got caught up in the struggle of poverty and trying to find ways to get out.”
Rezarek said he tried to get Labelle interested in producing music, and it worked for a while. But eventually Rezarek didn’t have the resources to keep letting kids in the neighbourhood come and record at his home studio.
In recent years, Labelle hadn’t been working with Rezarek. Rezarek said he thinks that more avenues for inner-city youth to explore music and other interests might have offered Labelle a way out of a dangerous life.
“It could have saved him,” he said.
When Rezarek heard what happened to Labelle on Thursday, he was “shocked.”
“I feel like I failed him in a way, because I wasn’t able to get him out of there,” he said. “D was very special. He was talented. He had a lot of skills. He was a natural-born leader.”
Friends of Labelle’s mother have set up a GoFundMe campaign to raise money for her son’s funeral costs.
Detectives, meanwhile, continue to investigate Labelle’s killing, the city’s second homicide of the year. Police have not yet determined a motive for the young man’s slaying.