Tabloid Headline :
”Hulking brute assaults child and the Justice System sees .... PINK“
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| The first constable made the right call. The Justice System after that ? Not so fucking much... |
You betcha : you beat the rap down from a indictable conviction and five years jail time to a $50 fine —-and you get to go on to kill 23 in a blaze of infamy.
And might it have been worth it for the province, in turn, to have hired Mary Ellen O’Toole, the world’s best profiler of “Injustice Collectors” with Red-Alert “leakage” incidents ?
Definitely : 23 not-dead, no blaze of infamy.
On October 29 2001, hulking six foot two Gabriel Wortman ran out of his home at 193 Portland Street Dartmouth to beat the living crap of a kid we will call Matt M standing at a bus stop, waiting for a bus.
He was only prevented from killing him when someone across the street, probably with their cell phone camera out, yelled out - “stop, he’s only a kid !” Gabe bolted.
Exactly two months after the kid was interviewed by police while in hospital recovering from his wounds, (December 29th 2001) Wortman was formally charged with criminal assault punishable by five years in prison, section 266-A.
At some point GW is alleged by the victim to have contacted him, offering him a bribe to drop his complaint.
GW’s only explanation for beating the kid near to death ? The kid said Wortman yelled “ you’re too close to my building” before he began punching and kicking him.
Now I have also waited at the very same bus stop many times and let me tell you brothers and sisters, it is impossible to stand at the bus stop sidewalk and not be “too” close to Wortman’s clinic : its just the way the sidewalk, the utility pole and clinic are built. The clinic has zero, none, zip, setback from the sidewalk.
The was no break-in at the clinic and nothing broken or stolen, by Wortman’s own account.
To beat the living shit out of an innocent kid waiting for a bus at a bus stop next to your shop, just because you are outraged that Halifax Transit dared build a bus stop, with all its working class passengers, right in front of your toney business, is way out of proportion for such an imagined slight.
Yes, I am paraphrasing Mary Ellen O‘Toole, as she is the world’s expert on these sort of situations, but she has repeatedly made her criteria crystal clear in every article and interview.
The world is full of “Injustice Collectors” : people who just won’t let an imagined slight go and blow out their reaction to it all out of proportion.
We all do this, to some extent ; but most of us, do indeed let it go after we cool down.
Others don’t, they seethe inwardly till the day they die. They feel like killing all of their many slighters, but they never do.
Others, a few others, do give off warning signs that they might some day revenge themselves on the world for all their imagined slights.
Their inner rage “leaks” out : they openly talk of killing people or they do a violent act that is WAY out of proportion for the imagined injury that provoked it.
In fact, in general, mass killers, are super-leakers : they leak like a nuclear reactor. They aren’t always ignored either : it is just that their actions are treated as trivial, so that they get to go on to kill massively.
Decades later than 2001, we do know that Gabriel Wortman openly and repeatedly talked about killing people he imagined had slighted him but way back in 2001 we have a clear example of a totally disproportionate violent response to a slight imagined slight — if only a few people had listened.
The HRM police constable who first charged Wortman, after interviewing everyone, clearly thought that the violence was way out of proportion to the imagined slight.
Constable Laurie Cuvelier, son of legendary NS Sports Hall of Famer Jim Cuvelier, charged Wortman with the serious indictable offence of assault, liable to up to five years jail time : Section 266 (A) of the Criminal Code of Canada - the first court date set for January 10th 2002.
No more professional medical license, no more comfortable millionaire’s lifestyle.
But a current millionaire’s income allows you to hire the most expensive criminal lawyer in the province, a guy named Pink.
The phone wires must have burned red hot that holiday weekend. But you don’t get to earn the big bucks by taking a nine to five attitude, do you ?
Because on January 3rd 2002, Cuvelier’s original printed out charge sheet for the first court appearance was hastily overwritten, by hand , at the last moment, by Constable Ronald Josey before JP Judith Gaul. The charge was scribbled down to 266 (b).
(Josey had ten years seniority on Cuvelier.)
Them darn red hot burning phone lines.
I don’t mean to imply that the senior police and senior prosecutors saw Red. I think they saw Pink.
Anyway, from five years jail time to $50 chump change. Just like that.
And so it was that on January 11th 2002, after Crown Prosecutor Barrett reviewed all the proceedings to date , he carefully weighed the evidence from Cuvelier that Wortman’s violence was extraordinary and well out of proportion to the slight he imagined ....against the trouble and expense of defending that charge against the full force of Pink and...
...agreed to stay with reducing the charge down to a $50 fine : a Section 266 (B) summary conviction offence, saving Wortman from losing his professional license.
To put it in Jim Cuvelier’s baseball vernacular : Pink won, Cuvelier nothing.
*Barrett on the court process sheet online, in all probability means acting Crown Prosecutor David G Barrett, a former Mountie, former CSIS guy, counsel to the NS retired Mounties association. An highly experienced, well-connected guy.
That darn Mountie-Wortman connection again....
While this was decided at January 2002 court appearance, the actual trial date, all for a $50 fine, was set for October 2002 - ten long months later.
Any sensible person, with a sensible pocket book, would have cut their losses then and there and pleaded guilty, paid their fine and discharged their very expensive lawyer.
But Gabe was very stubborn - as all the people who knew him agreed - and kept paying Pink and only pleaded guilty minutes before the summary conviction trial was set to begin.
If Gabe was colored (you pick a color, any color) rather than white, if he had been poor rather than a millionaire, would he have been sent down for such as extraordinary violent act out of all proportion to his imagined slight ?
If all the legal system individuals involved in this 2001 had been more aware of “Injustice Collectors” and “Leakage” of violent acts out of all proportion to imagined slights, might they have acted differently ?
Might any of them make peace with their God and offer up a heartfelt Mea Culpa ?
I suspect instead, today, they will just sigh inwardly and reflect “what’s done is done, there is no use crying over spilled milk, or spilled blood or 24 dead...”
My conscience is not so easily stayed : my reason for writing these blog posts on Wortman is my hope that there won’t be an inevitable next time ; that we will all learn to recognize the Red Alert warning signs of Leakage violence from Injustice Collectors, the people behind 90% of all forms of mass killings.
A public inquiry must focus on the warning signals , the Leakage, of Gabriel Wortman that were ignored.
Forget the f-ups on the day from the RCMP : most victims were already dead by the time the mounties first arrived.
Focus instead on this little discussed incident from two decades before, when the justice system’s decision let a mass murderer get away with his first act of overt extreme violence, fuelled his ego and allowed him to go on to bigger and worser things....
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