Almost one year on, Canada's former consul general to Miami is still piecing together the shards of a life shattered by the killing of her teenaged son and the grave charges laid against her other boy.
The grief she says at losing Jean Wabafiyebazu, 18, has begun subsiding. Dealing with her guilt has taken longer.
"It was a very long road to go from 'I am a bad mother' to 'I have made mistakes,'" Dube told The Canadian Press during a recent interview in her rented Miami bungalow. "There's a difference between the two."
Now 53, Dube stepped down as consul general last August after Jean and another teenager died in a hail of gunfire in a dingy Miami-area apartment. Outside, his brother Marc Wabafiyebazu, 15, was waiting in their mother's car.
Dube had thought little of it when Jean had asked for money to buy a textbook and take Marc to a restaurant and movie. The older teen had been doing well and she thought he could do with a reward. She loaned him her black BMW, with its diplomatic licence plates, because his car, which she now drives, was in the shop.
Instead, that March 30 afternoon, the brothers headed to the apartment to meet a pot dealer. Jean was carrying a loaded handgun. His plan, police would allege, was to rob the dealer of about 800 grams of marijuana.
"I didn't know Jean was capable of carrying a gun and entering an apartment and doing drug-trafficking, let alone to steal," said Dube, who remains a Canadian government employee on sick leave.
Jean left Marc sitting in the passenger seat when he went into the apartment, where the situation went horribly wrong. Within minutes, Jean and Joshua Wright, 17, would die in an exchange of gunfire. Outside, a distraught Marc was arrested. Investigators refused his repeated pleas to call his mom, who would go to bed that night wondering why she couldn't reach her kids by phone.
It became clearer early the next morning.
An anxious Dube was on her way to work when a friend at the Canadian embassy in Washington — alerted by the U.S. State Department, who had been contacted by local authorities — called to ask if her kids were OK, then directed her to a local hospital. Her unease turned to dread, then horror when the hospital advised her to call police and a detective told her by phone that Jean was dead and Marc was in custody.
In court, the judge gave the grief-stricken mother 30 seconds to hug her bereft, defeated son, who kept saying: "Jean est mort. Jean est mort."
At that moment, she said, she knew she had to shape up — for Marc's sake. "I couldn't grieve for Jean at that point. There was no space."
When a child falls ill, people generally react sympathetically. When a child is accused of being a criminal, Dube would soon learn, a common reaction is that, somehow, the parents must have failed.
"You really feel the blows," she said.
What she came to understand, she says, is it's how parents protect themselves.
Dube is acutely aware of the special ridicule reserved for mothers who unfailingly declare their children "innocent." True, she said, Jean had fallen in with a rougher, older crowd and had been arrested in Ottawa on a minor drug charge. But she and her ex-husband, whom she describes as a loving and supportive father, sat the youth down, persuaded him to change schools, to clean up his act. Jean had wept with embarrassment, she said.
There's no doubt, she said, that he committed a crime that day in Miami — with devastating consequences.
"You have two young lives, full of talent, full of dreams, who died so unnecessarily for two stupid pounds of marijuana," she said.
On the other hand, she insisted, Marc was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. He knows he should not have been there and has taken responsibility for his limited role, she said. But what's equally clear is that he did not kill or even threaten anyone.
"He did not participate in the felony. He was sitting in the car in the passenger seat, no means of communicating with his brother, unarmed."
Still, rather than submit to the vagaries of a trial and the potentially severe consequences of a conviction — two co-accused agreed to testify against him and plead guilty to minor drug charges in exchange for bootcamp and probation sentences — Marc Wabafiyebazu pleaded no contest on Friday to four charges, including two counts of 3rd-degree felony murder.
In exchange, the court handed down what is essentially a conditional sentence: boot camp, community supervision, and up to eight years of probation.
"Marc has his future," Dube told The Canadian Press after the plea terms were finalized. "He's going to be saved."
Now living in a cheaper rental in Miami, Dube still doesn't have her car back. Her surviving child has yet to come home. But Marc has been doing well, and they have started looking forward to the day they can put the tragic chapter of their lives behind them and truly move on. At the very least, she said, she can now look at photographs of her dead boy and smile.
"It goes away eventually," she said of the grief.
"I have almost a sense of joy. That he's with me. He's with Marc, and he will live through us. He has managed to tell me somehow that this was meant to happen and he's OK."
