A chilling portrait of a man obsessed with guns and anti-government rhetoric began to emerge as people in this eastern Canadian city struggled to reconcile the knowledge that the person charged with murdering three Mounties was the same one who had seemingly lived quietly among them.
Justin Bourque, 24, was caught and charged with three murders and two attempted murders on Friday, ending a 30 hour manhunt that closed schools, forced residents to hide inside their homes and paralyzed Moncton with fear.
He appeared briefly in court on Friday after he was charged in the second-deadliest attack on the Royal Canadian Mountain Police (RCMP) nearly 130 years.
However, as neighbors of his parents and others who knew Bourque spoke of a quiet man from a well-liked, Catholic family that home-schooled its children, recent posts on social networks told a very different tale — a litany of paranoid conspiracies that included statements on Russia being a threat to Canada and deep animosity toward authority figures.
A friend, Trever Finck, said he noticed changes in Bourque’s behavior over the past year, particularly after he created a new Facebook page for himself in February and filled it with anti-police messages and conspiracy theories.
His profile picture shows him standing in the woods with a friend, wearing camouflage gear and clutching a shotgun. What appear to be dozens of spent shell casings lie at their feet.
“I just want to know what was going through his head,” Finck said.
Church administrator Dianne LeBlanc said it had been many years since she had seen Bourque, who moved out of the family home about 18 months ago.
However, his parents never missed a Sunday service at Christ the King Catholic Church, she said.
They often arrived with at least a couple of their grown children in tow, she added.
LeBlanc said parents Victor and Denise home-schooled their children, who were raised speaking French.
“They’re a good family,” LeBlanc said. “They were such good Catholics. I’m sure [parishioners] are very sad for them.”
Bourque was charged with three counts of first-degree murder and two counts of attempted murder on Friday, during a short court appearance in which he appeared bearded and shaggy-haired amid high security.
Clad in aqua-colored jail clothes, he stared ahead intently, paying attention, but showing little emotion.
Bourque nodded when the judge said his name.
Officers stood guard outside the courtroom with their weapons drawn.
Bourque, who was represented by a court appointed legal aid attorney, is due back in court on July 3. Prosecutors and the defense agreed that a psychiatric evaluation was not immediately necessary.
On Friday, police released the names of the victims: Constables David Ross, 32, originally of Victoriaville, Quebec; Fabrice Georges Gevaudan, 45, originally of Boulogne-Billancourt in France; and Douglas James Larche, 40, of Saint John, New Brunswick.
Roger Brown, commanding officer of RCMP in New Brunswick, choked back tears as he addressed journalists.
Ross’ mother, Helene Rousseau, said there was a difficult road ahead for her son’s wife, who has a one-year-old and is due to have a second child in September.
“These children won’t remember of course. They will not have had the opportunity of knowing their father,” Rousseau said.
Armed with high-powered long firearms, Bourque was spotted three times on Thursday as he evaded the manhunt that all but shut down the normally tranquil city of about 60,000 people east of the Maine border.
Schools and businesses were closed for a day and police asked residents of the city’s northwest section to lock themselves in their homes as nearly 300 police officers searched for Bourque. A tip led police to a wooded, residential part of Moncton where they found Bourque at 12:10am on Friday.
He was not carrying any weapons, but some were found nearby, police said.
“I’m done,” a witness heard him tell the arresting officers.
Police have not given a possible motive for the shootings.
Meanwhile, residents moved from feeling relief at Bourque’s capture to grieving for the lives lost.
Families and school groups placed flowers and notes on the steps of a downtown police station, where one person placed a portrait of a solemn Mounty atop a horse.
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is to visit Russia next month for a summit of the BRICS bloc of developing economies, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) said on Thursday, a move that comes as Moscow and Beijing seek to counter the West’s global influence. Xi’s visit to Russia would be his second since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. China claims to take a neutral position in the conflict, but it has backed the Kremlin’s contentions that Russia’s action was provoked by the West, and it continues to supply key components needed by Moscow for
Japan scrambled fighter jets after Russian aircraft flew around the archipelago for the first time in five years, Tokyo said yesterday. From Thursday morning to afternoon, the Russian Tu-142 aircraft flew from the sea between Japan and South Korea toward the southern Okinawa region, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said in a statement. They then traveled north over the Pacific Ocean and finished their journey off the northern island of Hokkaido, it added. The planes did not enter Japanese airspace, but flew over an area subject to a territorial dispute between Japan and Russia, a ministry official said. “In response, we mobilized Air Self-Defense
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
The pitch is a classic: A young celebrity with no climbing experience spends a year in hard training and scales Mount Everest, succeeding against some — if not all — odds. French YouTuber Ines Benazzouz, known as Inoxtag, brought the story to life with a two-hour-plus documentary about his year preparing for the ultimate challenge. The film, titled Kaizen, proved a smash hit on its release last weekend. Young fans queued around the block to get into a preview screening in Paris, with Inoxtag’s management on Monday saying the film had smashed the box office record for a special cinema