Say his name every night, Montreal mom tells her son’s killer

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Lucas Gaudet and a group of friends made their way to St. Thomas High School last February expecting a fist fight.

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The boys had been recruited to help confront a 16-year-old student who had bullied a friend’s younger brother.

But the confrontation between two groups of teens outside a Pointe-Claire high school ended up being deadly.

During the melee, the 16-year-old youth stabbed another friend of Gaudet’s.

Gaudet tried to run away, but was chased down and stabbed in the back, his mother, Lynne Baudouy, told the Montreal Gazette on Wednesday.

Her son died in hospital two days after the stabbing.

On Tuesday, the 16-year-old West Island youth pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and aggravated assault, said Patricia Johnson, a spokesperson for the crown prosecutor’s office in Quebec City.

The prosecutor and the defense lawyer agreed to a five-year sentence. The teen will serve almost three years in a detention center followed by two years in the community. He cannot be identified because he’s a minor.

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In a victim impact statement read in Youth Court, Baudouy addressed the young man who took her son’s life.

“Take a good look at yourself in the mirror before you go to bed every night and say his name: ‘Lucas Gaudet,’ ” she said. “I hope you rehabilitate yourself and become a productive citizen of society.”

During her statement, Baudouy held up a picture of her son hooked up to life support machines in the hospital.

“You took our son and our brother from us,” she said, adding that Lucas is missed by friends, hockey teammates and family around the world.

“Everyone keeps asking us what we need. I need my son in his bed.”

In several interviews since her son’s death, Baudouy has spoken empathetically about the teen who killed Gaudet. “He is still a kid,” she said. “As they were reading his sentence from him, I felt I wanted to give him a hug.”

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Gaudet was a talented defenseman on both the school hockey team at John Rennie High School as well as at the double-A level for Pierrefonds.

He was the fifth Montreal minor killed over a 12-month period by assailants using a gun or knife.

His death during a violent altercation close to a high school shocked students and parents on the West Island, many of whom blamed the Lester B. Pearson School Board for not taking bullying seriously enough. A Pearson board director told the Montreal Gazette in March that school officials were not aware of a looming conflict between students, or they would have intervened.

Baudouy said she’s proud that her son wanted to defend someone who had been bullied, but added that his death should be a warning to other teens about the danger of carrying knives.

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“Life is not a video game,” she said. “Life is precious. We all think we will be here tomorrow.”

During his detention, the 16-year-old will attend school with other young offenders and participate in programs about anger management and empathy training.

“Each youth has an educator to accompany him (in his rehabilitation)” Mathieu Perrier, an educator at the Cité-des-Prairies, told the Gazette this month.

“The objective is to work with his needs, and the reasons he’s here. If you just lock a youth up and don’t do anything with him, you won’t see much impact in terms of him reoffending. There has to be rehabilitation. Our target with every youth is to look at what led him to commit his crimes from him, and work with him on that.

T’Cha Dunlevy of the Montreal Gazette contributed to this report.

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