Two very different takes on Gabriel Wortman from across the St Croix River : both are correct

Calais & St Stephen closer than Riverview & Moncton

The Saint Croix River forms part of the border between the US and Canada — and across that river, Calais Maine and St Stephen New Brunswick are so close to each other that it is as if they are living in each other’s pocket.

Yet separate public comments from people in those tightly knot communities on both sides of that river, on the Gabe Wortman they knew well when he was younger, could not differ more widely.

But I think both parties are 100% right in their views - their differing perspectives are entirely due to them knowing GW in different time periods and in very different environments.

Pierre D. Little is the publisher of the Calais Advertiser and of the Machias Valley News Observer and knew Gabe as a friend together in the rural Riverview NB suburb of Bridgedale.

Pierre twittered his response to cartoonist Mike De Adder’s vague recollections of GW in High School, in the early days after the shooting.

Pierre moved to a private school in the US in grade nine, but in junior high school recalls Gabe at age 12 as nice and normal - a kid with a kid’s fascination with airguns and making stink bombs with gunpowder.

I have speculated that the special airgun was a high powered US airgun, illegal in Canada and usually smuggled-in, in plain sight, as part of a family’s car vacation in the US.

It was treasured among the kids of my youth because while it looked exactly like a kid’s airgun, it secretly had all the power of dad’s .22 carbine with .22 shorts.

Laura Porter now lives in Charlotte County, just across from Calais, but grew up just 20 miles north of Riverview and early on posted on Facebook about the Gabe she knew - my first break in the steady diet out of New Brunswick of “oh what a great guy Gabe was”.

I always took Laura’s story totally seriously, even if the media ignored it, because her details were supported by another dorm mate of Gabe at UNB - a man now living in the UK. His accounts of Gabe-the-total-arsehole at UNB had been on the web circulating among his fellow dorm mates for 12 years.

And none, NONE, in all that time, disagreed with his assessment - and hence, indirectly with Laura’s.

Laura met her husband Rob and his best friend Greg at UNB Fredericton around 1990 - at the time when Gabe was in UNB’s own animal house, Bridges House dorm.

(**** see below) Greg had plenty of insight into Gabe at age age 22, ie ten critical years after Pierre knew him - because he was his actual dorm roommate.

Now the Riverview of Gabe’s school years was really an uniquely isolated geographic enclave and as a result was more small town than small city in many ways. All the teenagers attending the only high school knew a little about every other teen - it was a fishbowl and no place to have a second secret life.

And Gabe was young - the evidence suggests that narcissistic personality disorder, though formed earlier, first becomes clearly publicly manifest when a person, usually a male, is around 20.

Again I have speculated that at that age, many people have left their parents home and hometown and are now free to re-invent themselves in a new bigger place where no one knows them.

People with mental illnesses (not personality disorders) certainly also tend to become apparent at around age 20, but they do so whether they still live at home or not.

So Greg (and through him, Rob & Laura) knew Gabe when he was ten years older - at the time when his disorder tends to present publicly generally. That alone created a big difference in the viewpoints about GW.

But I believe that Gabe also manifest his real hidden nature now publicly because he felt free too.

Metro Fredericton is hardly larger than Moncton but it tends to have a greater percentage of NB, Canadian and foreign CFAs that metro Moncton/Riverview.

For not only was Gabriel well known in the small fishbowl of Riverview, as Wortman is one of the founding families of Moncton itself, he was indirectly known in Moncton through his hundreds of relatives.

But Fredericton, 200 km from Riverview and Mom and Dad - now he could re-invent himself.

So hair dyed silver, a cock ring, a public sex life (sex in public showers while dorm mates try to get ready for class.)

But also an calculated air of mystery : told no one anything about his family or background, made no friends or even acquaintances, picked fights over every little matter : an all around pain in the ass.

Voted Chuck Cosby award winner as UNB’s #1 arsehole.

In revenge he complained to the UNB admin so effectively that the award was banned the next year and a major student riot exploded in protest.

But Greg - and thus Rob & Laura - had an insight to GW that few others might have had.

By then Gabriel was a fully of age legal adult —- yet he had a stack of false names and false IDs, used when he went out at night, gone for days, never did say where or why.

This at a very time when Allan Legere was making a laughing stock out of the NB Mounties - killing and burning and assaulting all over the province while always evading capture.

That sounds a lot like Portapique 30 years later doesn’t it ?

Some in the media found Pierre Little online and printed his recollections - I am sure some found Laura Porter online as well - but her comments have never been reported in the media.

I have blogged - incessantly - as to just why the NB media won’t want to see her comments aired in their pages - but why have no national media or NS-based media taken up these disturbing revelations of GW’s UNB years ?

****Greg : I kidded myself that the only Greg I had ever heard of out Charlotte County was the very well known and longtime Tory politician Greg Thompson - obviously not him !

 But I checked anyway: yeah - way too old.

HOWEVER, the same obituary that revealed his age and education did reveal that he also has a son with same name,who is friend of Rob Porter and he is also a sociology grad - but he  joined the US  Army in Feb 1989 so he seemingly is out of the picture unless his tenure as Gabe’s roommate was from September 1988 til Feb 1989. God knows, living with a prickly control freak like Gabe might want to make me run away and join the army too !