FAREWELL TO THE FALLEN
Sorrow, scarlet and sombre remembrance
MONCTON, N.B. — That’s the deal, as Prime Minister Stephen Harper put it in fierce remarks at the regimental funeral for three Mounties slain last week in the line of duty.
“That is the understanding between us: their service, and our support.”
With those last few words did he capture the essence of one of the world’s great democratic bargains — the people allow police officers to carry firearms and even to use lethal force to protect them, so long as they do it lawfully, and in exchange, the people agree to have the officers’ backs.
If it works imperfectly, it works pretty damn well most of the time, but rarely has the bargain been so tested at both ends as it has been the past six days in this city of about 70,000.
And rarely has it ended like it did here Tuesday, with thousands of police from across Canada and the United States — at least 1,300 of them Mounties in Red Serge and Stetsons — marching in honour of their fallen comrades, while lining the road on both sides were citizens, the majority of them wearing red too.
Later, when the Mounties — and officers from dozens of towns and cities — entered the Moncton Coliseum for the service, the people got to their feet and clapped. They stayed that way for at least 45 minutes, the soft clapping lasting until the last of the visiting officers found their seats.
Last Wednesday evening, the three RCMP officers — constables Doug Larche, Dave Ross and Fabrice Gevaudan, respectively 40, 32 and 45 — were gunned down after responding to 911 calls from the public about a heavily armed man dressed in camouflage, walking brazenly in a residential area in the city’s north end. Arrested at gunpoint by an Emergency Response Team in the wee hours of Friday, but not until area residents had been under lockdown for 30 hours, was Justin Christien Bourque.
The 24-year-old was later charged with three counts of first-degree murder, and two of attempted murder in the wounding of constables Eric Dubois and Darlene Goguen, both of whom are expected to recover fully.
Bourque’s name wasn’t mentioned once in the twohour service, echoing the sentiments of many here that publicity given to one alleged mass shooter may help spawn the next.
“I do not say his name,” Lee Gervasi, who watched the solemn funeral processional along Millennium Boulevard, said firmly. She was there with her 21-yearold son Corbin and a colleague from the call centre where she works, all of them wearing red.
Gervasi said if she’s reading a newspaper about the shooting and sees Bourque’s name, or is talking about the events of that night, she refers to him as “it.’’
The funeral mixed Mountie regimental tradition — pipers, a stirring call to “To your colleagues, salute!” as three flag-draped caskets were carried in and from Assistant RCMP Commissioner Roger Brown, a choked and teary sendoff to the three men, “To your post, dismissed!” — with warm personal stories and a modern melange of religions and spirituality.
Within the service-for-three, there was one conventional funeral (for Larche, which featured cursory remarks from a chaplain, a furious, brilliant eulogy from his older brother, Daniel, and a Reba McEntire song); one deeply religious one (for Ross, which had three pastors speaking for the 32-year-old who met his wife Rachael in a Bible study class); and one New Age-y-service-cum-smudging-ceremony (for Gevaudan, whose spiritual adviser waxed eloquent about the “heart-centred” man who had moved from “the Earth plane to the spirit plane”).
The three men, all from the RCMP’s Codiac detachment headquartered in downtown Moncton, were clearly dramatically different. As a thoughtful colleague remarked, “They didn’t have a lot in common, did they? Yet they worked for a common good.”
Assistant Commissioner Brown, the CO for the RCMP in New Brunswick, put it another way: Having devoted their lives to something than themselves, their lives were so much richer.
Ross, one of two dog handlers at the Codiac detachment, raced from his home in such haste on the night of the shootings that he left the barbecue lid up and his garage door open. He loved animals, and one of the first questions he asked his wife-to-be when they met was, “Do you like dogs?”
In a eulogy written by his wife and read by her brother, Adrian VanderPloeg, Ross was called joyous, “an honest and happy man.” Apparently, he had a personal rule about never passing someone who might be in trouble, and admirable as that might be, VanderPloeg said, on one occasion it meant that a normal eighthour drive in a snowstorm went on for an eternity, with the young officer stopping to check in with the occupants of every vehicle they passed.
Larche, said his brother Daniel, a master seaman in the Royal Canadian Navy, was always “exactly who you needed him to be, precisely when you needed him to be that way.” It must be a Larche family definition: Their father, Dan, is a retired Mountie himself. That Wednesday, when Larche was needed by the citizens of his city and his colleagues, he was working plainclothes, but heard the call and ran to danger.
As for Gevaudan, he came to Canada as an immigrant from France and found a country, a woman, Angela, and her little girl to love. From his diving — he was an RCMP diver — he took the lesson that “it’s vital to focus on the now and not get distracted,” his adviser Geoffrey McLatchie said. The coliseum is Moncton’s hockey rink, where the Wildcats play, and the doors are posted with signs warning, “No airhorns permitted.” On Tuesday there was everything but — the pipes, the violin, a choir, a piano and song. There was a lament and the Last Post. There were bereaved little Larche girls, clutching Mountie dolls, and somewhere, a baby wailing; there almost always is at a funeral.
There was even a dog, Ross’s glorious, tail-up German shepherd, Danny. With a new handler, he marched behind his master’s hearse, stood by his casket at the front of the big rink, and waited with the honour guard for the final goodbye.
Sgt. Eric Bunday came from Hillsboro Police Department, a small force just west of Portland, Oregon. In 2011, he lost his mentor, Ralph Painter, in the line of duty. Painter was chief of the tiny Rainier, Oregon, force at the time. In a struggle, a suspect disarmed him and shot him with his own gun.
As it happens, Bunday had just taken over as the line-of-duty-death co-ordinator for the state. His first death was that of Painter, his great friend. “I carry it with me every day,” he said.
He paid his way across the continent to Moncton.
These were police deaths, after all; deaths in his family, but also in ours.