The murders are alleged, the wreckage isn’t
A merciless coward and a pair of desperados.
Killers, the three of them, allegedly. Two who are suspected of preying on strangers, one who is charged with wiping out his entire immediate family.
Young men. Online gamers. Nobodies.
But now each infamous, carving out a place in the annals of horrendous Canadian crimes.
The small B.C. town teenagers, Bryer Schmegelsky and Kam McLeod, have led law enforcement on a wide-ranging pursuit, a national manhunt into its 10th day. We’re such a big country, easy to hide, especially in remote areas. Scavenging dumpsites, exploiting the kindness of unaware strangers.
The Markham 23-year-old, Menhaz Zaman, waiting quietly for police at the door of his family home, no appetite for taking flight, it seems. Pathetic, though, in the self-reviling messages he’d cast into cyberspace, gathered by alarmed online correspondents around the planet, some of whom did their best to warn police.
There will come a day when some of this savagery might start to make sense, or at least the perverse sense that festers inside a disturbed mind, displacing reason and the innate revulsion most of us have toward taking a life.
But you’d have to be broken inside already, I think, to even contemplate the worst crime known to humanity when there’s no apparent benefit, no justification, however irrational, and only the slimmest of motive.
These three individuals are hardly more than boys, longtime friends Schmegelsky and McLeod only 18 and 19 respectively. The mysterious lives of boys.
A life of quiet desperation, suggestively, for Zaman, who’d wreathed himself in fabrications. An alternate reality, a tissue of lies, he’d woven for his parents, the truth of him only surfacing in those recent postings, many of which the Star has seen.
A life of banal normalcy for Schmegelsky and McLeod, at least on the surface, though there were troubling signals of radicalized white supremacy for the former. The fascination with Nazi memorabilia. Former classmates who’ve since claimed he’d spoken often of wanting to kill people, cut off their heads, then put a gun in his mouth and pull the trigger.
What bad moons rising could have possibly shaped such apparent monsters?
We often know nothing, really, of those closest to us. Every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way, Leo Tolstoy wrote. Every family is a potential tragedy. Every family is an enigma to outsiders, often not what it appears.
York Regional Police were sluggish finally confirming what had already been heavily disseminated on social media — that the four bodies discovered inside the Zaman home are mother, father, sister and grandmother of the young man charged with first-degree murder. How the victims were slain has not been divulged.
In messages posted on the Discord forum “Perfect World Void,” a communications forum used globally by millions who share their love of online gaming, a user with the handle “Menhaz” describes the murders as a twisted form of nihilist-corrupted kindness.
Better they should die than know the perfidy of his deceits.
According to the messages, he’d dropped out of university three years ago after failing in his mechanical engineering program and never told them. He’d spent his days whiling away the hours at a mall when they believed he was in class, doing well — boasts they’d made proudly to friends and family. That special pride of immigrant families envisioning the success of their firstgeneration Canadian children. So their kids won’t have to drive cabs and clean houses.
He felt like a “pathetic coward subhuman” who’d disappointed his parents, avoiding the day of reckoning.
Live in a fantasy world, a made-up dimension of avatars, role-playing and often violent virtual un-reality, and maybe you can no longer appreciate the difference, the ever-after fact of patricide and matricide.
The “Menhaz” user wallowed in his self-pity.
“I don’t want my parents to feel the shame of having a son like me.”
Other postings were far more graphic. The Star has a policy against publishing anything that jeopardizes an accused person’s rights to a fair trial. But the astonishing pronouncements are out there, on other media platforms, which strikes me as pointlessly virtuous by this paper.
In a profoundly interconnected world, the ubiquity of social media, it’s scarcely surprising that someone would spew his guts, his self-loathing, his alleged crimes, into the maw of cyberspace. But the other underlying phenomenon is how frequently young people with murder on their mind — or blood on their hands — will share their intensions, their committed crimes, with a broad spectrum of friends.
The notorious Bathtub Sisters, who drowned their mother and then blabbed all about it later.
The malice-infused teenager Melissa Todorovich, who commanded her boyfriend to kill Stefanie Rengel, whom she wrongly perceived as a love rival, a plot revealed to many, literally thousands of texts entered as evidence at trial. The Markham woman Jennifer Pan, who hired hit men to kill her Vietnamese-Canadian parents. She, too, had spun a web of lies, pretending to attend university, living with a roommate and volunteering at Sick Kids Hospital while actually living with a boyfriend’s family and working at a restaurant. Her extravagant deception was about to blow up.
There has been little insight culled by reporters into the dynamics of the ethnic Bangladeshi Zaman family and their son specifically. Just the usual “he was such a nice guy …” Which is also not a rarity; many dueling personalities can coexist in one individual, as we know from numerous serial killers who have hidden their pathologies in plain sight.
Considerably more has been elicited from Schmegelsky’s father, about a son originally designated by police as “missing” along with McLeod, both since charged with seconddegree murder in the death of Vancouver man Len Dyck and suspected in the double homicide of tourist couple Lucas Fowler of Australia and American Chynna Deese.
Alan Schmegelsky last week sent reporters an unpublished 132-page book outlining his family woes and the “broken system” that had shaped him and his son in the fallout of an acrimonious divorce, after which he hadn’t seen his son for years.
“My son and I have been treated like footballs. It’s time for some truth.”
Bryer, recounted his father, had been on his way to Alberta with McLeod in search of a job because they were unsatisfied with their previous employment at a Walmart store in Port Alberni. Alan Schmegelsky said his son had bought an expensive suit with his last paycheque.
“Now I realize it’s his funeral suit,” he said in a CTV video clip.
Bryer, described as “weird” by former classmates, came of age with video games and YouTube as the main influences in his chaotic life, Alan Schmegelsky added. “A normal child doesn’t travel across the country killing people. A child in some very serious pain does.” Inflicting pain. The father is convinced his boy will be killed in a confrontation with police, when the two teens run out of road and boosted vehicles.
“He’s on a suicide mission,” the senior Schmegelsky told The Canadian Press. “He wants his hurt to end. They’re going to go out in a blaze of glory. Trust me on this.” A blaze of glory. Glory. Fathers who don’t know a whit about their sons.
A son who allegedly kills and runs. A son who allegedly spills his family’s blood.
The human wreckage is unalleged.