BRIDGEWATER — "I love that girl," Vernon Macumber said, weeping, as he talked about the sweet thank-you card Karissa Boudreau made and coloured for him after he gave her a teddy bear she named Paws.
"She was my friend," Mr. Macumber told The Chronicle Herald on Monday as he talked about Karissa. "How close we were. I swear to God, if I had known . . ."
He is repulsed that his ex-girlfriend, Penny Boudreau, Karissa’s mother, killed her own child, and he is outraged that she says she did it out of love for him.
Ms. Boudreau was sentenced Friday to life in prison with no chance of parole for 20 years for strangling her 12-year-old daughter on Jan. 27, 2008.
Mr. Macumber said Ms. Boudreau and Karissa had been arguing a lot, but he had no idea his then-girlfriend would react the way she did. He denies that he gave her an ultimatum to choose between him and Karissa. He said he suggested they all go for counselling but Ms. Boudreau wouldn’t agree.
Shortly after the suppertime phone call Monday, paramedics and police were called to a north-end Halifax apartment building where a man was threatening to slit his throat with a knife. Sources say the man was Mr. Macumber.
Emergency Health Services spokesman Paul Maynard confirmed that paramedics were called to the building where a 47-year-old man was threatening suicide. But he said police kept the paramedics back while they dealt with the man and then sent the ambulance away.
By 7 p.m., all was quiet at the building where a resident confirmed that Mr. Macumber has been living in a basement apartment for the past year. She believes he lives alone.
A red, four-door Dodge Neon, believed to be the same car Ms. Boudreau was driving on the night she killed Karissa, was parked in front of the building, and the woman said it belongs to Mr. Macumber.
Halifax Regional Police were tight-lipped about the call, explaining that it is their standard procedure not to say much about "mental health" cases when someone is a threat to themselves but not to the public.
Mr. Macumber said during the earlier phone call that he felt something was wrong after Karissa went missing a year ago and he began drinking heavily, in part to deal with his denial. He said he just couldn’t bring himself to believe that Ms. Boudreau could have had any role in her daughter’s death.
When they moved to Halifax last spring, he insisted they live in separate apartments. By then, he was suspicious she might have been responsible for Karissa’s death, but he still didn’t know for sure.
"You’ve got to give the benefit of the doubt, you know? But to have the woman you loved betray you . . ." he said.
"I am an alcoholic because of this. I drink to make myself numb, I just don’t know how to feel anymore."
And Mr. Macumber said he can’t find employment, even though he had nothing to do with Karissa’s death and is as revolted by it as everyone else is.
"I loved working at the Superstore," he said. "I love working with people, but no one will hire me. I can’t get a job."
Mr. Macumber said that when he first met Ms. Boudreau, he was divorced, unhappy and never thought he would find love again.
"I found love twice," he said. "I thought I was the luckiest guy in the world. I had a girlfriend and a daughter. Here, I had it all, then all of a sudden, this. Two tragedies. This is a double tragedy."
Mr. Macumber wants people to know he cherished Karissa. He feels he hasn’t been given a fair shake by the media and wants to dispute the way he has been portrayed.
"I want you to give me an opportunity to have my say."
He wanted to do this in a face-to-face interview with a Herald reporter, not over the telephone. But he couldn’t keep back the flood of memories and emotions as he talked.
"I have her projects here, I still have them," he said, referring to treasured mementoes of a lovely girl who changed his life.
He said he still has Karissa’s hamsters and they are another link to the kind girl he misses.
The fish tank they were setting up together sits empty in his apartment. They had planned to fill it with water and pick out fish together. More than a year later, the empty tank offers silent testimony to a life unfulfilled.
Mr. Macumber cried as he thought of his infant son, Vernon Joseph, who died 23 years ago when he was just two hours old.
"It’s been so long since I thought of him, and now it all comes back," he said.
Mr. Macumber said he keeps a Bible in memory of his infant son.
"And you’d never believe it but Karissa loved to read the Bible," he said.
He said she would come into his room and ask to read it.
"That beautiful girl," he said, sobbing.