God Only Knows what New Brunswickers are really thinking and saying about Gabriel Wortman PRIVATELY - because the people down here on planet earth sure as hell don’t know.
If you think the Blue Line and its Cone of Silence is strong, you haven’t met the folks from the dulcet land of idyllic potato farms and saw mills.
Even people who grew up in New Brunswick but now live elsewhere are toeing the line : “as a child in New Brunswick, great kid ; as adult in Nova Scotia - a monster”.
“Maybe something in the Bluenose water down there, don't know, can’t explain it”.
At least the few souls from New Brunswick who have gone public with recollections of the early Gabriel Wortman have acknowledged he was from New Brunswick (and in point of fact, spent MOST of his life there).
That more than any of the New Brunswick media has done - the big national outfits as well : too busy averting their collective noses upward to study covid 19 (though New Brunswick is hardly a covid hotspot !) rather than raking muck down at ground level. At best they reprint stories clearly datelined as being written in other provinces.
(Hat tip there to Teddy Bear Roosevelt !)
Printing all the news and only the news ———- that our customers and advertisers want to hear.
But one New Brunswicker didn’t seem to have got the memo, perhaps because he is living in York UK.
While googling Gabriel Wortman I saw a reference to the NS killings on a Makem football site (in Sunderland, NE England if you’re not a soccer fan !)
The Message Board SMB (RTG Sunderland Message) is public to read and the thread was all about the Nova Scotia killings.
A new member “Brunswicker” joined in because he had been following the story since he was a fellow Maritimer originally and Wortman was a very very well known Moncton New Brunswick surname. His girlfriend prompted him.
Women notice jerks far more then men do, I find : (maybe some form of Jerk-Radar ?) . Any way she reminded him that he had once roomed with Wortman.
That’s when the light went on : he had roomed with him, he was very odd, even way back then and he had even been awarded an infamous award, voted the biggest asshole and loser on the entire (15,000 souls) UNB (University of New Brunswick, Fredericton) campus.
The winner of the Chuck Cosby Award for 1986-1987.
The award was designed to act as a social control to restrain creeps at UNB’s biggest and rowdiest male residence : Bridges House (think of a rather mild version of Animal House/Frat House).
A year there was like a year of living in a fishbowl with wild animals and no showers : some means of social control was needed if the majority of the residents hoped to maintain their grades and sanity.
That the Award was seen by most residents as essential was clear when a major student riot (physical violence and property destruction - in staid New Brunswick, of all places !) , broke out when the dean of Residents Mary Lou Stirling banned it in April 11 1991.
She had heard complaints from former recipients (Gabriel among them ?) that it left them shattered and humiliated.
Of course, THEIR victims, also felt the same way.
For let us make it clear that this award was NOT handed out to kids who kept their shirts buttons up to the top, wore pencil protectors and bathed infrequently. it was not awards to nerds and geeks : just to creeps, jerks, assholes and losers.
So, what were the signs that so marked “nice kid” Gabriel Wortman to deserve this asshole award ?
Were there early warnings as far back as 34 years ago that this guy had a propensity for unusual violence?
Could 24 deaths have been prevented ?
Is New Brunswick prepared to look deep into its collective soul and be honest ?
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