HALIFAX –
After his older brother, whom he met for the first time 10 years earlier, killed 22 New Scots in 2020, a Massachusetts man described his brother and sister to police as paranoid and said he had dark thoughts.
Jeff Samuelson, who was handed over for adoption in the United States in 1970, told RCMP staff that his brother Gabriel Wortman shared stories about his “terrible” upbringing and repeatedly told Samuelson he wanted to kill their biological parents.
“I always say we are connected in the same factory, but I went down another production line,” Samuelson said in an interview with an RCMP officer on April 27, 2020, days after the worst mass shooting in modern Canadian history.
The transcript of the interview, released Tuesday by the public homicide investigation, includes Samuelson’s story of meeting his biological family for the first time in 2010, 40 years after he was handed over for adoption. Samuelson initiated the contact at the insistence of his wife.
Before meeting in person in Nova Scotia, Samuelson said he spoke to Wortman on the phone several times.
In the calls, the killer “unloaded a mountain of information” about his childhood, Samuelson said, which he described as “horrifying” and full of violence.
“He was in tears, he was so angry, you know, he just wanted to explode in his childhood and (let’s say) how bad it was,” Samuelson told the RCMP.
In one story, the shooter told Samuelson that his father forced him to shoot his pet dog as punishment when he was 13 years old. Samuelson said he believed Wortman was angry with his parents for not telling him he had a younger brother who had been adopted.
“At the age of forty-one, and he realized that, it almost ended their relationship,” Samuelson told the RCMP. “It was enough for him. He hated his parents, he had a deep hatred,” he added.
His biological parents, Paul and Evelyn Wortman, visited the United States to meet Samuelson. Then, in the summer of 2010, Samuelson and his wife traveled from their home in Massachusetts to the Maritimes to see more of the family he had never met. This trip, which included a stay in Portapik, was the first time Samuelson had spent time with his brother in person.
The couple stayed with Paul Worthman’s brother, Glyn Wortman, whose home was one of many burned during the riots of April 18-19, 2020, but visited the house the shooter shared with his wife, Lisa Banfield.
Samuelson said his brother showed him many weapons when they arrived, including a grenade, a rifle he pulled from a garage desk, a Tommy rifle and a 9mm laser pistol, and what he believed was a silencer.
They were shown more than 10 weapons scattered throughout the residence, Samuelson said, describing them as “hidden in the open.” This led Samuelson to believe that the shooter was paranoid.
“Why would you have (weapons) anywhere in the house? But you have to be ready to act in any – every room in his – in his paranoid world,” Samuelson said.
The brothers did not keep in touch, and Samuelson said the last time he remembered talking to the shooter on the phone was in 2013.
Samuelson said he stopped contacting his brother because he was obsessed with money and talking about his personal wealth.
“I didn’t just want to listen to this man,” he said. “There was no room to build a connection.”
This Canadian Press report was first published on May 4, 2022.
This story was created with the financial support of the Meta and Canadian Press News Fellowship.
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