Where’s Kushi?

>> A local murder case raises questions about Canada’s ability to capture dangerous fugitives

by KRISTIAN GRAVENORNOR

A double murder late on the night of Friday, December 8, has led many local blacks to angrily question a policing system that they feel offers little incentive to capture suspected murderers possibly lurking amongst us.
The deadly events of that evening at the crowded reggae-dancehall club Bar Ivoire, at 4209 Notre Dame W. in St-Henri, started at 2:13 a.m. with a call from a patron who wanted the police to arrest a woman he complained had smashed his car windshield one month earlier. Cops from nearby Station 18 arrived at 2:21 a.m. but left the bar 12 minutes later, unable to find the woman in question. They then dealt with another unrelated call outside, eventually leaving at 2:41 a.m. Six minutes later the same cops were sent back after Bernard “Carefree” Rodrigues, 28, and Jason Alexander Forbes, 26, were reported shot to death.
The killer remains at large and the 50 or so patrons either fled the scene before the police arrived or remained to tell the cops that they had witnessed nothing. Police and several other sources agreed to speak to the Mirror on condition of anonymity.
While the victims had criminal backgrounds, they were both said to be searching for a way out of the world of petty crime. According to Arlene Forbes, Jason’s aunt, he was trying to get into a university and at his funeral, children praised him for his efforts in teaching them music.
Whether a coincidence or not, Bernard Rodrigues’ older brother Nicholas was also shot point blank and died on the sidewalk one night six years ago after a birthday party just a few doors down from the Bar Ivoire. On the night of April 22, 1995, Desta “Wonder” Barnes and Kushi Samuels allegedly shot and killed the older Rodrigues, and shot a second man who survived but remains confined to a wheelchair. One of the presumed shooters, Barnes, was found dead one year later in Miami, but Samuels has eluded captors.
Frustration at the police’s inability to capture Samuels has given rise to a preposterous conspiracy theory circulating among some West End blacks that suggests the police are protecting Samuels and employing him as a one-man death squad to kill people they dislike. Absurd though the rumour may be, it reflects a widespread impatience with law enforcement’s continuing failure to capture Samuels, who has been formally charged with homicide and has topped the RCMP’s most-wanted list since 1995. He’s being described as “armed and extremely dangerous.”

Anonymous Canadian criminals

While one investigator tells the Mirror that Samuels, 25, is believed to be in Jamaica, another informed police source says that it’s more likely that he temporarily went to Halifax, Ottawa or Toronto and has possibly returned. “Usually they return to the old community under another identity and there’s only two ways to catch them: he could get arrested for another crime and his fingerprints will betray him, or he’ll get denounced by an enemy or a rival,” he says.
The same cop says that the fact that Samuels remains at large has much to do with our Canadian law enforcement customs. Canada has no omnipresent nation-wide task force to catch wanted criminals. There’s no Canadian version of America’s Most Wanted, there’s no bail bondsman or bounty hunter culture here and the relatively few rewards offered rarely produce results. A series of $1,000 to $1,500 rewards offered by the Info-Crime unit of the Montreal police is said to be lightly used.
Sun Youth sometimes handles rewards, usually of around $5,000, but they’re rarely collected. There is currently only one reward being offered by the charity organization, according to spokesman Randy Mohammed. Also, there’s little evidence of the effectiveness of the rewards. For example, a reward for the killer of Janet Kulchinski led to 100 tips, none of which have panned out. A reward for the killer at the Bar Ivoire is being discussed but the cash reward will likely “start low,” says Mohammed.
One theory police are investigating about the St-Henri deaths involves the possibility of an ongoing blood feud that started with the 1995 slaying. Soon after the elder Rodrigues was killed, another Samuels brother was found dead of a gunshot wound, an apparent suicide. Kushi Samuels might have considered it murder, police think, which he presumably concluded was a settling of accounts by a Rodrigues, thus providing the motivation to commit the Dec. 8 slaying.
If the Samuels-Rodrigues conflict was perpetuated by the failure to find Kushi, it was also possibly allowed to continue partially because of a police decision to classify the second death in the sequence (the other Samuels’) as a suicide rather than a homicide, thus closing the case. It’s not an uncommon occurrence, apparently. “At least 30 per cent of what’s classified as suicide is actually a homicide,” says the same police source. :