Friends recall finding victim

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Duane Lacquette (SUBMITTED)

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The body of 21-year-old Duane Lacquette was found inside his home on the 3600-block of Centennial Boulevard in January 2010. (FILE PHOTO)

It wasn’t like Duane Lacquette to miss work.

More than four hours had passed since the lounge and restaurant supervisor’s shift was set to begin at the Canad Inns hotel, and he still hadn’t shown up.

Calls to his cellphone and Facebook messages had brought no response.

So two concerned friends who worked at the hotel with Lacquette — Kerri Logan and Mandy Routhier — headed to his Centennial Boulevard home.

The young women arrived to find the front door unlocked, and they entered to find the home dark except for a light from the basement.

They wandered the main floor, but there was no sign of Lacquette, and calls to him brought no response.

After Lacquette’s puppy, Deacon, ran up from the basement, the women decided to venture downstairs.

Logan went first, calling Lacquette’s name as she went. Routhier followed after she noticed that Logan’s voice had begun to tremble.

In the basement, lying in the middle of the floor next to a red stain, they found Lacquette’s body covered with a blanket, his bare feet sticking out from underneath.

"I just saw Duane and I kind of freaked out," Routhier would later tell court.

"I screamed to Kerri and asked her if I should phone 911 and she didn’t answer me. So I asked her again, and then she started yelling ‘Yes! Yes!’"

The women found the body of 21-year-old Lacquette on the evening of Jan. 16, 2010.

Nineteen days later, Jason John Ouimet — a gunner posted at CFB Shilo with the 1st Regiment Royal Canadian Horse Artillery — was arrested.

The soldier was initially charged with second-degree murder and was set to stand trial before a jury in Brandon court of Queen’s Bench on Monday. Instead, he entered a guilty plea to manslaughter and sentencing has been set for June 7.

His guilty plea means that previously unreleased details of the killing, withheld due to publication bans, can now be published.

That includes the above description of the discovery of Lacquette’s body and the following account of the events that led up to his death, as described by his friends who testified at Ouimet’s preliminary hearing in April 2011.

During their testimony, friends confirmed that Lacquette was gay, which is believed to have been the catalyst to the killing.

On Jan. 15, 2010, Lacquette, Logan and Routhier went out for the evening and ended their night of partying and drinking at the Roadhouse bar at Canad Inns.

It was there that Ouimet and Lacquette met for the first time.

Ouimet, who was at the Roadhouse during a night of drinking with some soldier buddies, was interested in one of Lacquette’s friends, a young woman named Carmen Teskey who was also at the bar.

When the Roadhouse closed around 2 a.m., Ouimet, Teskey, Lacquette and Routhier hopped into a cab, picked up beer at a vendor and went to Lacquette’s home to continue the party.

More guests and more beer arrived at the home as the night wore on, but eventually only Lacquette, Teskey and Ouimet remained in the duplex.

Teskey testified that she went down to the basement to sleep on the couch, but she left the home around 5 a.m. after Ouimet came downstairs, lay on the floor beside the couch and fell asleep.

Teskey told court she was "creeped out" by Ouimet. On the way out, she ran into Lacquette upstairs and told him she was leaving because she didn’t want Ouimet to try anything with her.

That left only Lacquette and Ouimet in the house.

An account of what happened next emerged as further witnesses testified at the preliminary hearing.

A police officer and firefighter described what they found in the basement when they responded to the 911 call from Logan and Routhier later that day, around 8:40 p.m. Underneath the blanket, Lacquette’s naked body lay on its stomach. His hands were over his head and bruises and blood marked his face.

A number of items were strewn between the body and a nearby couch — seat cushions, and clothing that included a pair of jeans by Lacquette’s head — and there appeared to be blood on the couch, the clothes and carpet.

Ouimet’s friend and fellow soldier Kris O’Brien testified that, shortly after the killing, Ouimet told him what had happened and had claimed that he didn’t mean to kill Lacquette.

Ouimet said that at some point Lacquette had offered to perform a sex act on him, which Ouimet declined.

However, Ouimet said that he fell asleep on the basement couch and awoke to find a naked Lacquette trying to "rape" him. Ouimet didn’t specify what Lacquette was doing to him and O’Brien said he didn’t ask.

Ouimet said he acted instinctively and in self-defence, O’Brien testified.

Punches were exchanged — Lacquette was 5-foot-7 and 165 pounds, while Ouimet is muscular and later told police that he’d been a national boxing champion.

O’Brien said Ouimet described how he got Lacquette off of him, put him in a UFC-style chokehold and choked him for a "while" or until he realized he was dead. Ouimet may have also said that he’d stomped on Lacquette’s neck at some point.

According to O’Brien, Ouimet said that when he realized that Lacquette was dead, he covered the body with a blanket, called a cab and fled the home.

An autopsy would later show that Lacquette’s injuries included a split right eyebrow, bruises behind his ear, bruises to his neck and a small broken bone in his neck.

An expert in forensic pathology concluded that Lacquette died from blunt force trauma to his head and neck and that the fatal injuries were to his throat.

Police questioned Ouimet the same day he told O’Brien of the incident, but Ouimet repeatedly denied having anything to do with the death.

Ouimet, who admitted he was "hammered" that night, said he was told Lacquette was gay before he was invited to the home, but he didn’t care.

He said that at one point, when he and Lacquette were alone upstairs and Teskey was in the basement, Lacquette had offered to perform a sex act on him.

Ouimet described the proposition as "kinda disgusting" but told police that he simply dismissed it as Lacquette was drunk. He said he simply informed Lacquette that he was straight, was interested in Teskey and then went downstairs to lay with her on the couch.

He said nothing physical happened with Teskey and he fell asleep only to awake around 6 a.m. to find no one around. He said he then left the house and claimed that he hadn’t seen Lacquette again.

Ouimet told police that Lacquette’s proposition didn’t anger him — he’d been around gay men before and found them to be "aggressive."

"There’s gay guys in the army, man, I live with them. So they don’t bother me, man," he told police at one point.

The Crown wanted all of the details of Ouimet’s conversation with police to be admissible for cross-examination if he testified at trial.

The judge ruled that the Crown had failed to prove that his statements were freely and voluntarily given. Therefore, Ouimet’s entire conversation with police was ruled to be inadmissible at trial.

During the preliminary hearing, defence lawyer Sarah Innes also questioned Lacquette’s friends about how he met men.

Lacquette’s female friends confirmed that he was openly gay and acknowledged that he’d spoken of one-night stands with men who’d initially seemed straight.

At times, he’d meet these men while out partying with his female friends. The man would show an interest in one of the women at first but, when the women left, Lacquette would approach the man to see if there was any interest and one thing led to another.

How much of the above account will be relied on during sentencing by Crown and defence lawyers remains to be seen.

» ihitchen@brandonsun.com

Republished from the Brandon Sun print edition May 1, 2012