Frank Nadler was about two kilometres away when he felt the concussion from the house explosion on Hickory Dr. in Mississauga.

The 58-year-old manages a warehouse near Hwy. 401 and Dixie Rd. The blast rattled the warehouse doors, he said, and Nadler initially thought a truck had accidentally rolled into the side of the building.

Later, he saw on the news the location of the blast and thought: “Please, don’t tell me my brother did that.”

The house at 4201 Hickory Dr., which suddenly blew up Tuesday afternoon, was owned by Robert Nadler and his spouse, Diane Page. Both died in the blast, which rocked the peaceful east Mississauga neighbourhood.

Residents described clouds of smoke billowing in the air as chunks of concrete, wood, paper and pink insulation rained from the sky. The cause of the blast is still unknown.

As next of kin, Frank expects he will eventually be asked to claim his brother’s body once the investigation is complete.

Sitting at his kitchen table in Oakville on Saturday, Frank reflected on Robert’s troubled life and said he cannot shake the speculation that the explosion was the result of his brother trying to commit suicide.

“He’s hinted at it before, that if his back were to the wall, (suicide) was a viable option,” Frank said. “I wouldn’t put it past him.”

Frank says he loved his brother but that they were estranged. And though the two had not seen each other in about five years, Frank says Robert could not hold a job and was never good with money. He believes his brother had burned through a recent mortgage refinancing and was broke.

“He wasn’t going to leave that house. He couldn’t just walk away. I knew what Bob was like.”

Frank said his brother was paranoid and afraid of large groups of people. He was afraid to leave the house. He didn’t have a driver’s licence and didn’t like to drive because he felt out of control in traffic. Robert had a need to be in control, his brother said.

Robert Nadler, 55, was convicted of a Peel Region murder in 1982. According to articles from the Star’s archives, Nadler killed his best friend in June 1979. The stories detail how Nadler admitted that he bludgeoned, strangled and knifed his friend Eric Pogson to death in a fight over drug money. Pogson’s body was found in a shallow grave in a bush near Golden Orchard Dr. in Mississauga on June 3, 1980.

As for reports last week that neighbours on Hickory Dr. saw foil covering the windows and that Robert Nadler believed jet contrails were poison, Frank said those beliefs started with their father.

Persecuted during the Second World War, Nadler’s parents fled Europe as teenagers. Frank Nadler met Kathe at a dance at the El Mocambo bar in Toronto and eventually had two sons. Frank worked as a maintenance foreman at a factory and Kathe packed biscuits at a Christie’s plant.

The younger Frank remembers his father once claiming that airplanes were poisoning his cucumber patch.

“My folks were paranoid,” he said. “They would stockpile food. In the year 2000, they thought the world was going to end. And that’s when they put the tinfoil up. They thought . . . it would help with the radiation.

“That transferred down to us: Be afraid of society. Don’t trust anybody. Don’t trust the government. . . Bob just went right along with it. Conspiracy theories.”

Robert was also intelligent and liked to write music with the aid of his keyboard. He faithfully looked after both parents when they became ill. And, as far as Frank knew, his brother and Diane were happy together.

In the years leading up to their father’s death, the brothers fought over the will, with Frank claiming that Robert manipulated a change in the will that resulted in him getting their parents’ house — the house that was destroyed in Tuesday’s explosion. Frank dropped his legal battle in part because the costs were too high.

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Frank also said that his brother tried to keep his father from the rest of the family, and that he did not find out his father had died until two months after the burial.

Growing up in Etobicoke, the brothers attended the same schools. Frank says Robert was quiet and “sensitive.”

Into his late teens, his anxiety led him to create an alter ego of sorts, a “façade to hide behind,” Frank said.

“He’d had to puff himself up before he walked into a room. He’d shake his hair and become this character to deal with the group of people he had to deal with. Because he had anxiety. So he created this . . . personality to get through that. Because he had to be in control. Giving you sass. The man in the room.”

Robert Nadler was set to turn 56 on Canada Day. His brother does not yet know any specifics of how he died.

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