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At their grieving father’s Gloucester house on Wednesday, a childhood photograph of his two sons is face-down on a shelf.

“It makes me sad looking at that picture,” Germano Wabafiyebazu said.

The sudden loss of both of his sons – one shot dead and the other in a detention centre facing an unknown future – has stunned him.

“Now I’ve lost my 17-year-old son, and I don’t see how to change it,” he said. “It’s too late.

“Add to that the case of (my younger son) – he’s not even cleared. It’s too much for somebody like me. I’m not somebody accustomed to this kind of life.”

Both sons were born in Ottawa and grew up in the national capital. Between 2005 and 2008, they were posted with their mother in Zimbabwe.

Wabafiyebazu, who is half-Angolan and half-Congolese, met Dubé in 1983. He said he still considers the mother of his children as family and that the two, though separated, remain on good terms.

Growing up, the children were privileged and wanted for nothing.

“They had everything,” he said. “They never had problems. That is what is sad.”

But children need boundaries and limits, Wabafiyebazu said.

Wabafiyebazu said he worked hard to raise his children right but that the allure of an easy lifestyle and the influence of others began to take its toll on his elder son Jean, who struggled with substance abuse.

He was extroverted, handsome, always well-dressed, drove the same BMW he drove to his death to school. Wabafiyebazu said he feels they “lost control” of the boy they raised.

He warned his children that what would be considered “play” on this side of the border would come with harsher consequences in the States.

Jean’s body will be flown back to Ottawa this week for a funeral and burial.

Anthony Rodriguez was released on $150,000 U.S. bail Wednesday. Wabafiyebazu’s younger son remained in the Miami-Dade Juvenile Detention Center pending a bail hearing.

Ottawa Citizen

With files from William Marsden, Meghan Hurley, Don Butler and The Associated Press.

syogaretnam@ottawacitizen.com

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