Just a Nice, Misunderstood Kid

"Marc, a 15-year-old boy, then does exactly what a 15-year-old boy would do under these circumstances and waits at the crime scene for over seven minutes until the police arrive."
"These are not the acts of a hardened criminal. These are the acts of a 15-year-old boy who just saw his brother murdered."
"The truth is, Marc was subjected to interrogation for nearly 12 hours without his Miranda rights ever being read or explained to him."
"[Marc Wabafiyebazu] did nothing more than sit in a car while his brother made a series of bad decisions which cost him his life."
"[He] went to the house to steal the drugs while he waited in the car but then his brother got killed."
Miami court motion, defence lawyer Kurt Obront

Marc (left) and Jean Wabafiyebazu

Two years separated Marc and Jean Wabafiyebazu; one fifteen, the other seventeen. Both boys were accustomed to perpetrating drug rip-offs in Canada, living with their father in Ottawa while their mother was posted to Miami as the consul-general for the Canadian consulate in the city. Their father warned them, before they left to live with their mother in Miami, that authorities in the United States would be less lenient than those in Canada, and they were to watch themselves.

It hardly matters from whom warnings of this kind emanate, young thugs think they are invulnerable, that nothing could possibly come between them and their choices in life; their choice being to continue being the small-time criminals who are accustomed to being bullies flashing guns, robbing other thugs who possess narcotics that they have the financial means to pay for, but see no reason why they should.

The two brothers embarked on a local Miami venture, having contacted a drug dealer to advise that they were interested in a drug deal. Money would be no object for the two boys, but the two from a privileged background who certainly knew that what they were doing was criminal, thought they could just pull guns and impress the dealer with a threat sufficiently frightening to allow them to grab the drugs and leave.

What happened instead was a shoot-out, with the older brother Jean mortally shooting 17-year-old dealer Joshua Wright, while Joshua mortally shot Jean Wabafiyebazu. The 'uninvolved', innocent bystanding Marc is shown in a neighbour's closed circuit camera video to emerge from the car he was sitting in, owned by his diplomat mother, to rush into the apartment with a gun in hand and appearing to later shoot Anthony Rodriguez, another suspected drug dealer, who had run out of the apartment.

His lawyer insists that the "spontaneous statements" made by Marc Wabafiyebazu on his arrest, such as threatening to kill one of the police officers, the admission that the brothers conducted similar drug rip-offs in Ottawa, and their intention to repeat that crime in the Miami case, are to be thought of as "highly suspect", since police had overlooked the requirement to inform the young man of his legal right to silence or to legal counsel.

The 15-year-old now faces seven charges; adult felony murder, and attempted murder among them. Portraying him as an innocent child is what the family's lawyer is paid to do. The reality of the situation is that Canada inadvertently sent two little thugs along with their diplomat mother to represent the country's finest, in the United States, which has more than enough of its very own home-grown thugs.