Martin Couture Rouleau: Clues of a tragedy foretold

Part 2: A special report. Click here to read Part 1.

ST-JEAN-SUR-RICHELIEU

Neighbours who had known him as a smiling teen quick with a cheery bonjour barely recognized the insular 25-year-old who kept his head down and said nothing.

Friends saw him falling heavily into a new religion soon after his bid to start his own power-washing cleaning business failed. He grew a long beard, wrote out the Quran over and over, then started gorging on Internet jihadi-porn, as one friend termed it. He became estranged from friends and family and his infant child. He seemed brainwashed, some said.

He preached his fervour to the world on Facebook under his new name, Ahmad Rouleau, spouting conspiracy theories, bashing American policies and military personnel, becoming so radicalized his desperate father called the police last June for help.

The RCMP arrested him at the airport a month later when he tried to fly to Turkey, a common stopover for would-be freedom fighters eager to enlist in the battle of the righteous in Syria or Iraq. Lacking clear evidence of terrorist or criminal intent, prosecutors advised officers to let him go. They seized his passport, ensuring he could do no harm outside Canada. Couture Rouleau became one of 93 individuals under active RCMP surveillance across the country.

RCMP outreach officers met with him several times over four months to try to change his way of thinking, to avoid him turning to violence, as did the imam from the modest strip-mall mosque Couture Rouleau had joined. In their last meeting on Oct. 9, police thought they were making progress.

Yet despite all the efforts and the interventions and the concern, all the seemingly obvious clues of a tragedy foretold, 11 days after his last meeting with police, Couture Rouleau left the basement apartment in his fathers house, bade an innocuous good morning to his father, and drove off in his 14-year-old Nissan Altima to quietly bide his time outside a federal government agency building that provided services to many of the military men and women stationed in St-Jean-sur-Richelieu.

After two hours idling beside the Tim Hortons on the main drag in this peaceful city of 94,000 located 40 kilometres southeast of Montreal, he finally spied his prey: a soldier in uniform. He stepped on the gas, accelerating through the parking lot, seriously injuring one soldier in civilian clothes and killing the one in uniform, 53-year-old Warrant Officer Patrice Vincent.

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Martin Couture Rouleau: Clues of a tragedy foretold