"Super good guy" dad with joint custody kills 4-year-old son in murder-suicide (Montreal, Canada)

Clueless neighbors galore here. Dad SERGE VEZINA was a "super good guy" and "devoted father." Right-o. I suppose that's why he strung up what was no doubt a terrified 4-year-old and strangled him to death in a makeshift hanging. Yea, wonderful father that....If that's a "super good" dad, then give me a lousy disinterested dad anyday.

And before the fathers rights crowd chimes in on how Daddy was no doubt traumatized with hurt feelings and the like from his mistreatment by the family courts, note that Daddy HAD joint custody. Joint custody, that wonderful thing shoved down everybody's throat like a magic elixir. If we had more or less mandatory joint custody, the argument goes, "frustrated" daddies wouldn't be acting out and harming themselves or others.

Well, guess what? If Mom had had sole custody, no paternal visitation, this little boy might still be alive.

http://www.montrealgazette.com/Julie+killed+then+himself+police/4173159/story.html

Ste. Julie man killed son, then himself: police
By Jan Ravensbergen, Montreal Gazette January 26, 2011

MONTREAL – A preliminary autopsy report on the body of 4-year-old Jérémy Vézina has determined his cause of death as “assisted strangulation, compatible with a hanging,” Sgt. Pierre Tremblay of the Régie Intermunicipale de police Richelieu-St. Laurent said Wednesday evening.

Investigators had already tentatively classified a double death on the city’s South Shore discovered early Tuesday as “murder followed by a suicide,” Tremblay said earlier in the day.

Indications, he added, are ever stronger that Serge Vézina, 50, hanged young son Jérémy, then hanged himself – “unassisted,” Tremblay said – in the garage of his Ste. Julie home some 35 kilometres east of Montreal.

Time of the father-and-son deaths was estimated at between 5:30 p.m. Monday and about a half-hour before their bodies were discovered Tuesday morning, Tremblay added.

Vézina had been a mechanic at the Canadian Tire in Boucherville for the past two decades. He had been just over two-thirds of the way through a three-week vacation, said a subdued Guy Hachey, the store’s manager:

“He was supposed to come back to work next week,” Monday, Hachey said.

“This is an enormous shock, a great sadness for everybody,” added Hachey, who said he’d known Vézina for 11 years.

There were no indications in recent weeks from Vézina that anything was wrong, Hachey said.

“If we had known,” he added, “this would not have happened.”

Vezina “was a super good guy. We don’t understand.

“Why? We can’t give an answer.”

Police had been summoned to Vézina’s home on Maurice-Duplessis St. via a 911 call, arriving about 8:35 a.m. Tuesday and breaking in to discover what Tremblay called an “extremely difficult” scene in the garage.

Jérémy’s mother, from whom Vézina had been separated for about a year, had became suspicious when their son was not at his day-care centre, the police spokesperson said.

“She called police after she saw her child’s boots through the window of the front door, and the car of her ex parked.”

Shocked neighbours described Vézina as a devoted father who had coached the child’s little-league baseball team.

“We have no reason to doubt that,” Tremblay added.

Jérémy was legally with his father at the time of his death, in line with a separation agreement that shared custody between the parents, Constable Serge Côté, another police spokesperson, had said Tuesday.

Geneviève Guilbault of the Quebec coroner’s office said the autopsies – which are automatic in such circumstances – were conducted Wednesday.

Final reports, including toxicology results documenting any presence of drugs or alcohol, are likely to take some time.

The coroner in the case is Dr. Alexandre Crich.

Read more: http://www.montrealgazette.com/Julie+killed+then+himself+police/4173159/story.html#ixzz1CwUJ4nsx