Bar Ivoire slaying:
witnesses wanted

After three months police have made little headway in the investigation of a double murder committed in front of 50 bar patrons and a video camera just before closing at St-Henri’s Bar Ivoire on December 8. The witnesses all fled before they could be questioned, and some of the victims’ so-called friends have come forth but only with fruitless leads, according to a Montreal Homicide insider. Grief has turned to frustration for the mother of one of the victims, who is pleading for witnesses to come forth.

Fay Forbes, the mother of 26-year-old music teacher Jason Alexander Forbes, believes her son ended up at the bar after his companion Bernard Rodriguez, 28, a clerk at a West Indian grocery store, was lured there by a phone call from a mystery female acquaintance. “Maybe Rodriguez was worried, so he asked my son (Jason) to come along,” says Forbes. The caller was apparently absent, and both men were shot and killed just minutes after police had departed the scene after investigating an earlier call. The double-murder resembled the 1995 killing of Rodriguez’s older brother Nicholas, allegedly committed by the fugitive Kushi Samuels. Samuels’ older brother later died mysteriously. One theory about the recent double murder has it that Samuels might have had a motive, as he possibly blamed his brother’s death on the younger Rodriguez. Witnesses of the shootings or those with knowledge of Kushi Samuels’ whereabouts are urged to call Montreal Homicide at 280-2052. :

—Kristian Gravenor