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It was two days before Christmas — 2:30 a.m. — and Madeleine Leclair’s tinnitus was acting up. So bad was the constant noise in her ears, Leclair felt sick to her stomach.

Knowing a neighbour loved to stay up late, Leclair and her friend, Keith Fitzsimmons, bundled up against the December cold in Vanier and stepped outside, hoping to borrow some Gravol from the neighbour to ease the nausea.

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A few doors away, someone else was outside, too. He was just 15, hopped up on alcohol and cocaine and carrying a sawed-off rifle.

Within minutes, Fitzsimmons would lie dying on the sidewalk with a single bullet lodged in his heart.

On Monday, the killer, now 16, pleaded guilty to second-degree murder in an Ottawa courtroom.

Canada’s Youth Criminal Justice Act protects the youth’s name, but the details of his crime were laid out in court by assistant Crown attorney Jon Fuller.

According to an agreed statement of facts, the youth and his friend, Sébastien Lafleur, 21, spent the evening of Dec. 22, 2017 in Lafleur’s apartment at 51 Jolliet Ave., playing video games, drinking and each doing two or three lines of cocaine. The youth brought with him the sawed-off rifle that he kept under his bed at home and that the two friends occasionally would bring with them when out on the town.