Ottawa shooting by Michael Zehaf-Bibeau was ‘last desperate act’ of a mentally ill person, his mother writes | National Post
Michael Zehaf-Bibeau’s terror-filled rampage in the nation’s capital this week wasn’t driven by some grand ideology or political motive, but rather was the “last desperate act” of someone who was not well in his mind and felt trapped, his mother says.
In a lengthy written statement to Postmedia News on Saturday, Susan Bibeau said her son was anxious to travel to Saudi Arabia — not Syria as police have stated — but when his passport application kept being held up, he likely felt cornered, “unable to stay in the life he was in, unable to move on to the next one he wanted to go to.
At the heart of this tragedy, she wrote, is mental illness. Bibeau said her son, who police have said was raised in Montreal, had a serious addiction to drugs, which surely affected his mental state. His conversations were strange — he often spoke of the devil, for instance — leading the family to wonder, “Was he crazy?”
The family tried to help, but he resisted it.
He was an unhappy person who was “at odds with the world,” and so he turned to religion and Islam as a way to make sense of it, Bibeau wrote.
Because religion is not something she can easily relate to, conversations were often one-sided, with him doing the talking and her doing the listening.