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“I like your shoes.”
The words were the last that Alain Brosseau heard before being dropped head first over the side of the Alexandra Bridge onto the rocky shoals of the Ottawa River. It was just before midnight on Aug. 21, 1989.
Brosseau’s body washed to the Gatineau side of the river during the night while his assailants continued a gay-bashing rampage fuelled by whisky, hash and and hate.
The teenagers had descended earlier that evening on Major’s Hill Park, then a popular cruising area for gay men, to “roll a queer.”
But in Brosseau, they lit upon an unsuspecting waiter with a longtime girlfriend on his way home to Gatineau after an evening shift at The Château Laurier.
Alain Brosseau was a popular member of the staff at the Chateau Laurier. He was a gifted mimic and could recreate any number of actors, comedians and cartoon characters.
The stark horror of the event would shock the city, mobilize its gay community — long the target of violence — and bring about unprecedented police reforms. In its wake, the Ottawa Police Service would pioneer diversity training and become the first in the country to establish a hate crimes unit.
Brosseau’s murder took place at a time when gay activists were engaged in two epic struggles: one, a battle to win resources for their fight against HIV/AIDS, and the other a quest to have “sexual orientation” added to human rights legislation.
Judy Girard, then president of the pioneering social services agency Pink Triangle Services, says the crime made everyone in the gay community reflect. “We had achieved all these rights and yet people were still being murdered because they looked gay,” she remembers. “There was a sense of, OK, enough of this already. We have to protect people.”
The Brosseau murder became a political rallying cry. As a result, it became less about one man and more about a community. Yet it was then and it remains today a profound personal tragedy.
Brosseau’s father, Jean-Paul, died 13 years ago from a cancer that his wife believes was hastened by his grief.
“My husband had a lot of trouble with what happened: we couldn’t talk about it. He couldn’t hear people talking about it,” Anita Brosseau, 81, told the Citizen in a recent interview. “For me, I had a lot of friends, they consoled me. My husband, he kept it all inside.”
Anita Brosseau still lives in Longueuil, Que., the Montreal suburb where Alain was born and raised. It has been 25 years since her son’s murder became one of this city’s most notorious, affecting crimes.
“The sadness isn’t as bad now,” she says, “but we don’t forget.”
The Victim
Growing up in Longueuil, Alain Brosseau dreamed of being a great chef. He went to cooking school, trained as a sommelier, and worked at a number of Quebec hotels.
When he heard about a job opening at Ottawa’s famed Château Laurier, he decided to move to the National Capital Region to explore new possibilities. He settled in Gatineau, within walking distance of his job at the Canadian Grill, a restaurant that regularly played host to Parliament Hill’s powerbrokers.
The restaurant’s deep alcoves, banquette seats and dim lighting offered the ideal habitat for backroom politics. The Canadian Grill’s waiters were known as much for their discretion as their wine selections.
Brosseau was a popular member of the staff: his easy charm and slight build allowed him to blend effortlessly into any room. He was a gifted mimic and could recreate for his friends any number of actors, comedians and cartoon characters, including whole scenes with Donald Duck.
The capital also allowed Brosseau to indulge another great passion: fishing. He loved being on the water and spent many happy mornings in his boat on the Ottawa River. Sometimes, he’d take his girlfriend, Véronique, along for a day of sunshine.
Often, he’d return to Longueuil to visit his parents and three younger siblings, Michelle, Isabelle and Rejean. “When he came to see us and spent two or three days, I loved that,” says his mother. “He would sometimes come with his girlfriend during the holidays … He was a good boy.”
During his five years in Ottawa, Brosseau developed the habit of walking home from work across the Alexandra Bridge. He found it relaxing to visit the river’s hypnotic calm after the bustle and hubbub of waitering. Colleagues at the Château Laurier, however, warned him against the practice: they said it was dangerous, particularly at night.
It’s not clear if Brosseau ever understood why his route was perilous. In the late 1980s, Major’s Hill Park, behind the hotel, was a clandestine meeting place for gay men — and a hunting ground for those who would do them harm.
During the early summer of 1989, two men — John Miller, 36, and Peter Vainola, 37 — were killed in mysterious falls from the cliffs at Major’s Hill Park. The police dismissed foul play and the chief regional coroner, Walter Harris, rejected an inquest. “Short of erecting a 20-foot fence with barbed wire,” he said, “I’m not really sure what anyone can do.”
On Aug. 11, the Ottawa Citizen carried a front-page story about the seventh person to fall from the cliffs that summer. Some had lost their balance while seeking an out-of-the-way place to urinate on Canada Day. Other falls went unexplained. Then city councillor Marc Laviolette, whose ward included Major’s Hill Park, said he wanted to know what attracted so many people to such a hazardous place.
Barry Deeprose and Judy Girard are local gay activists who were instrumental in improving relations with the Ottawa police after the murder of Alain Brosseau. Girard was one of the instructors when the force’s officers underwent training sessions on gay culture.
Those in the city’s gay community could have offered an answer: they also knew that not all of the incidents were benign. David Pepper, a longtime Ottawa activist, said gay men were being attacked in the park, a popular cruising area. “That whole summer, there was all sorts of violence happening around Major’s Hill Park: there had been robberies, assaults and bizarre falls. Those of us in the community knew these weren’t just accidents.”
Judy Girard says violence was a common feature of gay life in the 1980s, particularly for closeted gay men who were more likely to seek out sex partners in parks and public washrooms: “There was always an element of violence if you were gay back then. There still is today, but it was much more profound back then.”
On the evening of Aug. 21, 1989, at about 11:30 p.m., Brosseau walked unknowingly into that world when he set out alone for the Alexandra Bridge.
It was a Monday night.
The Crime
Earlier that day, four young friends converged on a Centretown apartment to drop acid, smoke hash and guzzle whisky. Jeffrey Lalonde, 18, Thomas MacDougall, 18, Duane Martin, 17, and a 16-year-old, known as Reid, found kinship in their troubled backgrounds.
All had left home during their high school years; they now relied on petty crime to subsidize their drug and alcohol binges. Lalonde, blonde-haired and muscular, was the group’s most imposing figure.
After downing two 40-ounce bottles of whisky, the group set off for Major’s Hill Park at 10:30 p.m. Their plan, as one of them would later testify, was to “roll a queer” since gay men in the park were considered easy targets unlikely to report being victimized. They had been preying upon park denizens all summer. MacDougall carried an imitation .45 automatic; Martin concealed a knife.
In the park, the gang confronted a man sitting on a bench: MacDougall put the fake gun to his head and the man, terrified, bolted from the park. Martin stabbed him in the lower back as he raced for the safety of the Market and its crowds.
The gang then wheeled north toward the Alexandra Bridge just as Alain Brosseau was making his way home from the Château Laurier.
Martin initiated the attack, hitting Brosseau across the back of the head with a stick. The waiter turned to confront his attacker, but he was overwhelmed by punches and kicks. The gang pummelled him to the ground, took $80 from his pockets, and forced a ring from his finger.
Lalonde stole the chain from Brosseau’s neck. Then, according to the eyewitness testimony of 16-year-old Reid, Lalonde suddenly heaved a dazed Brosseau up and over the railing by his calves. He dangled him headfirst from the bridge.
“I like your shoes,” Lalonde said as he released his grip. Brosseau scrabbled madly for a hold on the bridge, but couldn’t arrest his fall.
“The guy is dead: that must be 100 feet down,” Lalonde said as the group continued across the bridge.
Former police chief Thomas Flanagan embraced diversity training.
In downtown Gatineau, they met two friends, Henry Hynes, 20, and Mauricio Carpio, 23, and bought drinks with their stolen cash. The gang, however, had still not spent its murderous force.
Hours later, now six strong, they took two taxis to Orléans and broke into the Borland Drive home of a man Martin and MacDougall had robbed weeks earlier in Major’s Hill Park. Their haul had included the man’s wallet, full of identification, which provided his address.
The man, a 36-year-old civil servant, woke to find three members of the gang by his bed at 3 a.m. One of them looped a belt around his neck, dragged him out of bed and warned, “You faggot, we’re going to kill you.” He was poked in the eye with a screwdriver, stabbed in the back, and slashed across the neck before being wrapped in a blanket and dumped in the trunk of his car. The man’s roommate was stabbed in the abdomen and slashed across the throat. He played dead on his bedroom floor.
The gang fled when they couldn’t start the victim’s car. Both men survived life-threatening injuries to testify against their attackers.
The Impact
The Ottawa police arrested all six young men within 48 hours and charged them with attempted murder in connection with the Orléans attack. Days later, the group’s still darker secret emerged. Murder charges followed.
For Brosseau’s family, friends and co-workers, there was only anguish: “The people at the Château Laurier cried a lot and so did we,” says Anita Brosseau.
Rejean Brosseau came to Ottawa to identify his brother’s body. “He was in bad shape,” says Brosseau, now 54.
Meanwhile, in Ottawa’s gay community, long-simmering anger at police inaction started to boil. Local activists organized a “Blow the Whistle” campaign: they urged gay men to carry whistles as a measure of protection and demanded that police do a better job of targeting park predators.
“If it had been any other kind of group, there would have been concern, empathy and task forces,” says David Pepper, one of the activists behind the campaign. “But there was a refusal to acknowledge that gay men were being targeted for violence.”
Activists had two problems to overcome: police indifference (or outright hostility) and the gay community’s traditional insularity. Ottawa’s gay community had a deep mistrust of police dating back decades to the RCMP’s national security campaigns that sought to identify homosexual civil servants, considered prime targets for blackmail by Soviet agents. In the mid-1970s, the Ottawa police routinely named men who used male prostitutes and famously raided the city’s gay bath house on Wellington Street.
Initially, the Brosseau case served only to further alienate the gay community from the police since law enforcement officials publicly characterized the murder as an isolated incident.
Once the criminal cases reached trial, however, the testimony left no doubt that the murder was part of an ugly, protracted gay bashing campaign.
Jeffrey Lalonde told the Citizen in a jailhouse interview that he came to hate homosexuals after being sexually abused as a child. (He committed suicide in a Quebec prison in May 2008 while serving a life sentence for second-degree murder.)
City councillor Mark Maloney, a member of the police board, was so disturbed by the gulf that existed between the police and gay community that he brokered a meeting between the two sides. A coalition of gay activists sat down with senior police officials in July 1991. They formed the GLBT Ottawa Police Liaison Committee, among the first of its kind in the country, to open the lines of communication.
Then police chief Thomas Flanagan met with the committee in October 1991 to accept a report from the Ottawa-Hull Gay Task Force on Violence. Among other things, it called for sensitivity training and the formation of a police hate crimes unit. Flanagan vowed to consider the ideas. He also promised to launch more patrols in areas where gays were being attacked and to crack down on officers who voiced anti-gay sentiments.
“As with any other sort of discriminatory attitude, whether it be racial or homophobic, whether it be gender-based, I’m not prepared to stand for it,” he told reporters.
Many credit Flanagan with changing the tenor of the conversation between police and the gay community.
“He had no problem at all with gays and just wanted to make a better police force,” remembers Barry Deeprose, a founder of the AIDS Committee of Ottawa.
Flanagan eventually embraced the task force’s call for diversity training. Beginning in 1992, every one of the police force’s 600 members went through a three-hour training sessions on gay culture. “Both sides learned a lot from it: I know I came to appreciate the nature of their reality as well,” says Girard, one of the instructors. “I think relations between the gay community and police became astronomically better after that.”
Ottawa police launched the country’s first hate crimes unit in January 1993. David Pepper considers it a watershed moment in this city’s police-minority relations. “I believe it fundamentally shifted the dialogue and discussion,” he says. “It promoted the understanding that there was a police mandate to investigate and prevent hate crimes … But it wasn’t just about gays and lesbians. It was about blacks, Jews, immigrants.”
Two years later, in another indication of just how much things had changed, Pepper was hired by the Ottawa police as director of community development and corporate communications. He held the post for 17 years before moving to OC Transpo.
After Alain Brosseau’s murder, David Pepper was one of the activists behind a ‘Blow the Whistle’ campaign urging gay men to carry whistles as a way to protect themselves and calling for police to do more to stop violent predators from targeting them.
During his time with the force, Pepper saw the pride flag raised at police headquarters; he listened to the police chorus perform with the Ottawa Gay Men’s Chorus; and he marched in the Pride Parade alongside uniformed officers. The GLBT police liaison committee continues to meet each month.
Pepper says all of it goes back to Alain Brosseau, a straight man who died because his attackers thought he was gay. That fact made his murder resonate with the broader community, he says, and invested it with a power that would have been denied a gay victim.
“It meant no one was safe from someone who waned to bash a gay — because they don’t ask you for a membership card,” Pepper says.
“But the thing that has always weighed on me is that we’ve never really been able to talk to his family or recognize that his life wasn’t wasted … I don’t know if his family understands the power and the symbolism of Alain Brosseau.”
Time served:
Jeffrey Lalonde was 36 years old when he died by suicide in Laval’s medium-security Leclerc Institution while serving a life sentence for second-degree murder, and a concurrent 10-year sentence for attempted murder in the Orleans stabbings.
Thomas MacDougall received seven years for manslaughter in Brosseau’s death and two years for breaking into the Orleans home.
Duane Martin, a young offender moved to adult court, received an eight-year sentence for the Orleans stabbings and two years for robbing Brosseau.
Henry Hynes received 10 years for the Orleans stabbings.
Mauricio Carpio received two years for breaking into the Orleans home.
Reid, a young offender turned Crown witness, was handed a suspended sentence after serving nine months in pretrial custody.
Related
查看原文...
The words were the last that Alain Brosseau heard before being dropped head first over the side of the Alexandra Bridge onto the rocky shoals of the Ottawa River. It was just before midnight on Aug. 21, 1989.
Brosseau’s body washed to the Gatineau side of the river during the night while his assailants continued a gay-bashing rampage fuelled by whisky, hash and and hate.
The teenagers had descended earlier that evening on Major’s Hill Park, then a popular cruising area for gay men, to “roll a queer.”
But in Brosseau, they lit upon an unsuspecting waiter with a longtime girlfriend on his way home to Gatineau after an evening shift at The Château Laurier.
Alain Brosseau was a popular member of the staff at the Chateau Laurier. He was a gifted mimic and could recreate any number of actors, comedians and cartoon characters.
The stark horror of the event would shock the city, mobilize its gay community — long the target of violence — and bring about unprecedented police reforms. In its wake, the Ottawa Police Service would pioneer diversity training and become the first in the country to establish a hate crimes unit.
Brosseau’s murder took place at a time when gay activists were engaged in two epic struggles: one, a battle to win resources for their fight against HIV/AIDS, and the other a quest to have “sexual orientation” added to human rights legislation.
Judy Girard, then president of the pioneering social services agency Pink Triangle Services, says the crime made everyone in the gay community reflect. “We had achieved all these rights and yet people were still being murdered because they looked gay,” she remembers. “There was a sense of, OK, enough of this already. We have to protect people.”
The Brosseau murder became a political rallying cry. As a result, it became less about one man and more about a community. Yet it was then and it remains today a profound personal tragedy.
Brosseau’s father, Jean-Paul, died 13 years ago from a cancer that his wife believes was hastened by his grief.
“My husband had a lot of trouble with what happened: we couldn’t talk about it. He couldn’t hear people talking about it,” Anita Brosseau, 81, told the Citizen in a recent interview. “For me, I had a lot of friends, they consoled me. My husband, he kept it all inside.”
Anita Brosseau still lives in Longueuil, Que., the Montreal suburb where Alain was born and raised. It has been 25 years since her son’s murder became one of this city’s most notorious, affecting crimes.
“The sadness isn’t as bad now,” she says, “but we don’t forget.”
The Victim
Growing up in Longueuil, Alain Brosseau dreamed of being a great chef. He went to cooking school, trained as a sommelier, and worked at a number of Quebec hotels.
When he heard about a job opening at Ottawa’s famed Château Laurier, he decided to move to the National Capital Region to explore new possibilities. He settled in Gatineau, within walking distance of his job at the Canadian Grill, a restaurant that regularly played host to Parliament Hill’s powerbrokers.
The restaurant’s deep alcoves, banquette seats and dim lighting offered the ideal habitat for backroom politics. The Canadian Grill’s waiters were known as much for their discretion as their wine selections.
Brosseau was a popular member of the staff: his easy charm and slight build allowed him to blend effortlessly into any room. He was a gifted mimic and could recreate for his friends any number of actors, comedians and cartoon characters, including whole scenes with Donald Duck.
The capital also allowed Brosseau to indulge another great passion: fishing. He loved being on the water and spent many happy mornings in his boat on the Ottawa River. Sometimes, he’d take his girlfriend, Véronique, along for a day of sunshine.
Often, he’d return to Longueuil to visit his parents and three younger siblings, Michelle, Isabelle and Rejean. “When he came to see us and spent two or three days, I loved that,” says his mother. “He would sometimes come with his girlfriend during the holidays … He was a good boy.”
During his five years in Ottawa, Brosseau developed the habit of walking home from work across the Alexandra Bridge. He found it relaxing to visit the river’s hypnotic calm after the bustle and hubbub of waitering. Colleagues at the Château Laurier, however, warned him against the practice: they said it was dangerous, particularly at night.
It’s not clear if Brosseau ever understood why his route was perilous. In the late 1980s, Major’s Hill Park, behind the hotel, was a clandestine meeting place for gay men — and a hunting ground for those who would do them harm.
During the early summer of 1989, two men — John Miller, 36, and Peter Vainola, 37 — were killed in mysterious falls from the cliffs at Major’s Hill Park. The police dismissed foul play and the chief regional coroner, Walter Harris, rejected an inquest. “Short of erecting a 20-foot fence with barbed wire,” he said, “I’m not really sure what anyone can do.”
On Aug. 11, the Ottawa Citizen carried a front-page story about the seventh person to fall from the cliffs that summer. Some had lost their balance while seeking an out-of-the-way place to urinate on Canada Day. Other falls went unexplained. Then city councillor Marc Laviolette, whose ward included Major’s Hill Park, said he wanted to know what attracted so many people to such a hazardous place.
Barry Deeprose and Judy Girard are local gay activists who were instrumental in improving relations with the Ottawa police after the murder of Alain Brosseau. Girard was one of the instructors when the force’s officers underwent training sessions on gay culture.
Those in the city’s gay community could have offered an answer: they also knew that not all of the incidents were benign. David Pepper, a longtime Ottawa activist, said gay men were being attacked in the park, a popular cruising area. “That whole summer, there was all sorts of violence happening around Major’s Hill Park: there had been robberies, assaults and bizarre falls. Those of us in the community knew these weren’t just accidents.”
Judy Girard says violence was a common feature of gay life in the 1980s, particularly for closeted gay men who were more likely to seek out sex partners in parks and public washrooms: “There was always an element of violence if you were gay back then. There still is today, but it was much more profound back then.”
On the evening of Aug. 21, 1989, at about 11:30 p.m., Brosseau walked unknowingly into that world when he set out alone for the Alexandra Bridge.
It was a Monday night.
The Crime
Earlier that day, four young friends converged on a Centretown apartment to drop acid, smoke hash and guzzle whisky. Jeffrey Lalonde, 18, Thomas MacDougall, 18, Duane Martin, 17, and a 16-year-old, known as Reid, found kinship in their troubled backgrounds.
All had left home during their high school years; they now relied on petty crime to subsidize their drug and alcohol binges. Lalonde, blonde-haired and muscular, was the group’s most imposing figure.
After downing two 40-ounce bottles of whisky, the group set off for Major’s Hill Park at 10:30 p.m. Their plan, as one of them would later testify, was to “roll a queer” since gay men in the park were considered easy targets unlikely to report being victimized. They had been preying upon park denizens all summer. MacDougall carried an imitation .45 automatic; Martin concealed a knife.
In the park, the gang confronted a man sitting on a bench: MacDougall put the fake gun to his head and the man, terrified, bolted from the park. Martin stabbed him in the lower back as he raced for the safety of the Market and its crowds.
The gang then wheeled north toward the Alexandra Bridge just as Alain Brosseau was making his way home from the Château Laurier.
Martin initiated the attack, hitting Brosseau across the back of the head with a stick. The waiter turned to confront his attacker, but he was overwhelmed by punches and kicks. The gang pummelled him to the ground, took $80 from his pockets, and forced a ring from his finger.
Lalonde stole the chain from Brosseau’s neck. Then, according to the eyewitness testimony of 16-year-old Reid, Lalonde suddenly heaved a dazed Brosseau up and over the railing by his calves. He dangled him headfirst from the bridge.
“I like your shoes,” Lalonde said as he released his grip. Brosseau scrabbled madly for a hold on the bridge, but couldn’t arrest his fall.
“The guy is dead: that must be 100 feet down,” Lalonde said as the group continued across the bridge.
Former police chief Thomas Flanagan embraced diversity training.
In downtown Gatineau, they met two friends, Henry Hynes, 20, and Mauricio Carpio, 23, and bought drinks with their stolen cash. The gang, however, had still not spent its murderous force.
Hours later, now six strong, they took two taxis to Orléans and broke into the Borland Drive home of a man Martin and MacDougall had robbed weeks earlier in Major’s Hill Park. Their haul had included the man’s wallet, full of identification, which provided his address.
The man, a 36-year-old civil servant, woke to find three members of the gang by his bed at 3 a.m. One of them looped a belt around his neck, dragged him out of bed and warned, “You faggot, we’re going to kill you.” He was poked in the eye with a screwdriver, stabbed in the back, and slashed across the neck before being wrapped in a blanket and dumped in the trunk of his car. The man’s roommate was stabbed in the abdomen and slashed across the throat. He played dead on his bedroom floor.
The gang fled when they couldn’t start the victim’s car. Both men survived life-threatening injuries to testify against their attackers.
The Impact
The Ottawa police arrested all six young men within 48 hours and charged them with attempted murder in connection with the Orléans attack. Days later, the group’s still darker secret emerged. Murder charges followed.
For Brosseau’s family, friends and co-workers, there was only anguish: “The people at the Château Laurier cried a lot and so did we,” says Anita Brosseau.
Rejean Brosseau came to Ottawa to identify his brother’s body. “He was in bad shape,” says Brosseau, now 54.
Meanwhile, in Ottawa’s gay community, long-simmering anger at police inaction started to boil. Local activists organized a “Blow the Whistle” campaign: they urged gay men to carry whistles as a measure of protection and demanded that police do a better job of targeting park predators.
“If it had been any other kind of group, there would have been concern, empathy and task forces,” says David Pepper, one of the activists behind the campaign. “But there was a refusal to acknowledge that gay men were being targeted for violence.”
Activists had two problems to overcome: police indifference (or outright hostility) and the gay community’s traditional insularity. Ottawa’s gay community had a deep mistrust of police dating back decades to the RCMP’s national security campaigns that sought to identify homosexual civil servants, considered prime targets for blackmail by Soviet agents. In the mid-1970s, the Ottawa police routinely named men who used male prostitutes and famously raided the city’s gay bath house on Wellington Street.
Initially, the Brosseau case served only to further alienate the gay community from the police since law enforcement officials publicly characterized the murder as an isolated incident.
Once the criminal cases reached trial, however, the testimony left no doubt that the murder was part of an ugly, protracted gay bashing campaign.
Jeffrey Lalonde told the Citizen in a jailhouse interview that he came to hate homosexuals after being sexually abused as a child. (He committed suicide in a Quebec prison in May 2008 while serving a life sentence for second-degree murder.)
City councillor Mark Maloney, a member of the police board, was so disturbed by the gulf that existed between the police and gay community that he brokered a meeting between the two sides. A coalition of gay activists sat down with senior police officials in July 1991. They formed the GLBT Ottawa Police Liaison Committee, among the first of its kind in the country, to open the lines of communication.
Then police chief Thomas Flanagan met with the committee in October 1991 to accept a report from the Ottawa-Hull Gay Task Force on Violence. Among other things, it called for sensitivity training and the formation of a police hate crimes unit. Flanagan vowed to consider the ideas. He also promised to launch more patrols in areas where gays were being attacked and to crack down on officers who voiced anti-gay sentiments.
“As with any other sort of discriminatory attitude, whether it be racial or homophobic, whether it be gender-based, I’m not prepared to stand for it,” he told reporters.
Many credit Flanagan with changing the tenor of the conversation between police and the gay community.
“He had no problem at all with gays and just wanted to make a better police force,” remembers Barry Deeprose, a founder of the AIDS Committee of Ottawa.
Flanagan eventually embraced the task force’s call for diversity training. Beginning in 1992, every one of the police force’s 600 members went through a three-hour training sessions on gay culture. “Both sides learned a lot from it: I know I came to appreciate the nature of their reality as well,” says Girard, one of the instructors. “I think relations between the gay community and police became astronomically better after that.”
Ottawa police launched the country’s first hate crimes unit in January 1993. David Pepper considers it a watershed moment in this city’s police-minority relations. “I believe it fundamentally shifted the dialogue and discussion,” he says. “It promoted the understanding that there was a police mandate to investigate and prevent hate crimes … But it wasn’t just about gays and lesbians. It was about blacks, Jews, immigrants.”
Two years later, in another indication of just how much things had changed, Pepper was hired by the Ottawa police as director of community development and corporate communications. He held the post for 17 years before moving to OC Transpo.
After Alain Brosseau’s murder, David Pepper was one of the activists behind a ‘Blow the Whistle’ campaign urging gay men to carry whistles as a way to protect themselves and calling for police to do more to stop violent predators from targeting them.
During his time with the force, Pepper saw the pride flag raised at police headquarters; he listened to the police chorus perform with the Ottawa Gay Men’s Chorus; and he marched in the Pride Parade alongside uniformed officers. The GLBT police liaison committee continues to meet each month.
Pepper says all of it goes back to Alain Brosseau, a straight man who died because his attackers thought he was gay. That fact made his murder resonate with the broader community, he says, and invested it with a power that would have been denied a gay victim.
“It meant no one was safe from someone who waned to bash a gay — because they don’t ask you for a membership card,” Pepper says.
“But the thing that has always weighed on me is that we’ve never really been able to talk to his family or recognize that his life wasn’t wasted … I don’t know if his family understands the power and the symbolism of Alain Brosseau.”
Time served:
Jeffrey Lalonde was 36 years old when he died by suicide in Laval’s medium-security Leclerc Institution while serving a life sentence for second-degree murder, and a concurrent 10-year sentence for attempted murder in the Orleans stabbings.
Thomas MacDougall received seven years for manslaughter in Brosseau’s death and two years for breaking into the Orleans home.
Duane Martin, a young offender moved to adult court, received an eight-year sentence for the Orleans stabbings and two years for robbing Brosseau.
Henry Hynes received 10 years for the Orleans stabbings.
Mauricio Carpio received two years for breaking into the Orleans home.
Reid, a young offender turned Crown witness, was handed a suspended sentence after serving nine months in pretrial custody.
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查看原文...
