So, please, look hard and long and deep at UNB’s infamous Chuck Cosby riots of April 11 1991 as a potential subject. I think it is a story with legs, as they say in the J-trade.
Canadians tend to think of the people of New Brunswick as an un-demonstrative sort (when they bother to think of them at all) —- sort of like the Swiss or Belgians, except less exciting.
But on this date, a vast crowd of very angry UNB students in residences stormed across the campus, smashing windows, tearing everything valuable off walls that was permanently attached : pure destructive anger.
They were very very upset that the administration had dared to ban the awarding of the Chuck Cosby Day award at the annual student awards do.
The award, voted upon by students in residence, went to one who among them was voted the biggest pain in the ass/asshole in the residences.
The administration though had just heard from victims of past awards who spoke up about the shame, pain and hurt experienced from having to live on a campus after the award while 15,000 students and staff knew all about all of your failings.
A cross between living in a fishbowl and awaiting the arrival of a lynch mob to drag you out to the nearest tree.
But the equally angry residences students said that is exactly how they felt — living for three or four years in a big fish bowl where silly incidents and irritants that might be shrugged off once grew into festering sore points after a year or two.
They needed the fear of being awarded the Chuck Cosby Award to act as a form of restraint upon those residents who might be tempted to go into major asshole territory during their time at UNB.
It is easy to feel sympathy for both those awarded the notorious mark of ignominy and those who had to suffer at their antics all year.
Who doesn’t fear having ‘the roommate from hell’ ?
Who doesn't want to be avoid being publicly bullied and ostracized by an entire quasi-gated community of 15,000 ?
People who attended UNB in the late 1980s are now coming forward and remembering their fellow classmate/roommate Gabriel Wortman - the New Brunswicker who went on a murderous rampage across Nova Scotia in April 2020 , for more than 12 hours killing whoever he came across, leaving 24 dead in Canada’s worst ever mass shooting, only stopping when he himself was shot dead by the police.
They say that Gabriel himself got a Chuck Cosby Award and that more generally people didn’t like his manner and treated him badly (in response ?)
Now Wortman was almost 52 when he went on his rampage of death, not 18.
But if confirmed about receiving the award for the biggest campus asshole, it suggests a pattern we are familiar with from many school shootings : people who, for what ever reason are odd or judged odd, get a bad reaction back from the majority, and this cycles ever upward in a ratchet pattern of dislike and distrust, until for some, it all explodes in a murderous ‘revenge on my oppressors’ fantasy.
Wortman’s eventual trade was as a denturist and he was very good at it - in general he was very good with his hands at anything he turned to.
However, he choose not to practise in his small hometown of Moncton where he might be thought to have a built-in pool of potential clients already (but where everybody also knows a little bit of everybody) but rather in metro Halifax-Dartmouth where he had to build up his client pool from scratch, but where his former life on campus remained mostly unknown.
Clearly, one response we gather from people who knew him was that Wortman, from being a little odd and being seen as a little odd, developed a thick skin or mask of being the guy who was always smiling and who was always joking about.
But sometimes the mask slipped and people saw flashes of extremely over the top anger.
But more often the perceptive saw that beneath the mask were the signs of the inner sadness and depression that drove him to be a heavy drinker and eventually a mass killer seeking revenge and a final sort of fame.
And then ending it all by suicide : death by cop.
Dear friends tell me not to talk about Gabriel Wortman and to honour his victims by forgetting about him.
Sorry but I do not want to HONOUR his victims, I want there to be no victims at all.
Only by seeking explanations can we spot future mass killers in waiting and get them whatever best treatment we can create to reduce their anger and hate.
Not easy, because I suspect some are born with altered brain chemistry who then, in addition, go on to experience trauma of violence or abandonment that leaves their plastic young minds scarred for life.
For a very few, a further trigger put them into high murderous rage.
Still even one or two mass killers stopped and fifty lives saved and hundreds of family members saved the grief, seems worth it.
So, please please, write the PhD and write that book...
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