The Lionel Desmond inquiry wraps up

Can we ever really know why Lionel Desmond killed his wife, daughter and mother, and then himself? Does that matter? Don’t we know enough now about all that went wrong in the years and months leading up to the murder-suicide to begin demanding change on all fronts? Was Cpl. Lionel Desmond a victim of a […]

‘The rest is for the seagulls’

We may never know all the complex factors that led Lionel Desmond to murder his wife and family, and then kill himself. But we’re learning. It’s complicated. On the evening of Jan. 3, 2017, Lionel Desmond, a 32-year-old former Canadian soldier, murdered his 31-year-old wife, Shanna, their 10-year-old daughter, Aaliyah, and his 52-year-old mother, Brenda, […]

Complicated legacies

Was Lionel Desmond a victim of his war demons? Or was he a villain, a perpetrator of domestic violence who murdered his own family? Or both? We may never know. “Speak not ill of the dead man.” Spartacus “The evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones.” Shakespeare Legacies have always been […]

Christopher Garnier’s PTSD: right policy, wrong result, better outcome…

This column originally appeared in the Halifax Examiner September 3, 2018. Sometimes a right policy results in a wrong result. Most of the time — including in the case of convicted murderer/diagnosed PTSD sufferer Christopher Garnier — we are better off focusing on the right policy rather than on the occasional unexpected, unhappy wrong result of that […]

The Desmond file: belatedly untangling the threads that led to a murder-suicide

This column originally appeared in the Halifax Examiner January 2, 2018. One year ago tomorrow, on January 3, 2017, 33-year-old Lionel Desmond parked his car on a logging road in Upper Big Tracadie, NS, just as the sun was setting. Armed with two rifles, including an SKS semi-automatic Soviet military weapon he’d bought a few days earlier […]