# Talk:1997 Saint-Casimir mass suicide

'This was the only OTS transit that ... was purely voluntary and did not involve murder'
Can't check the reference, but I believe that killing a person who asks you to kill them still counts as murder, so the killing of Druau would have to be murder, wouldn't it? As for 'purely voluntary' - well, 'pure' seems a strong word, since the cultists did try to kill their children twice involuntarily. 62.73.72.3 (talk) 01:53, 5 October 2024 (UTC)

If you kill someone who asks them to kill you it is probably more along the lines of assisted suicide, which when prosecuted is usually manslaughter not murder. Well, it might be tried as such in some jurisdictions. Depends on the circumstances, the country, and many factors but that is what the source says. A murder is not simply killing someone, but a specific legal thing, differentiated from other counts. Since there was no one alive to try, I suppose if they had abandoned the plot after Druau died it may have turned out differently but unlike the others none of the deaths here were declared to be murder by the authorities, which is not the case for the 1994 and 1995 transits.
It did not involve murder, but it did involve attempted murder. And then they stopped. Those are not the same thing, so I think it is fair to say. PARAKANYAA (talk) 02:01, 5 October 2024 (UTC)
Assisted suicide is defined in the article on the subject as 'the process by which a person, with the help of others, takes medications to end their own life' or otherwise as 'when another person materially helps an individual person die by suicide, such as providing tools or equipment'. This is contrasted with voluntary euthanasia, in which the doctor takes a more active role. So killing someone who asks them to kill you would be closer to voluntary euthanasia, not to assisted suicide, but such a description would still be absurd in this case, because euthanasia is 'the practice of intentionally ending life to eliminate pain and suffering' and does not include 'the practice of intentionally ending life to send a person to Sirius'. The description as 'manslaughter' doesn't seem to fit, since manslaughter is normally either involuntary or the result of the offender 'act[ing] "in the moment" under circumstances that could cause a reasonable person to become emotionally or mentally disturbed'. The OST believers were not 'acting in the moment' and their beliefs can hardly be described as those of reasonable persons. (Assisted suicide is apparently treated - illogically - as manslaughter in some US states, but the acts were committed in Canada.) All in all, deliberately killing someone is normally, by default, considered murder with the exception of certain very special cases, and I don't think that the fact the victim asked to be killed is enough to make it one of these cases. However, if the source does say explicitly that no murder was involved, the claim will have to stay, however wrong it may be in my opinion. I would just request a quotation to verify that the source does indeed say that.
Concerning the description 'purely voluntary' - if one means by 'transit' only the deaths that did occur, then it was voluntary, since these deaths were voluntary; but I think it makes more sense to use the term to refer to the entire proceeding intended to bring about a 'transition', and suggesting that said proceeding consistently respected consent is clearly incorrect. I see no reason to refer only to successful killings as 'true transit', since the successful killings produced an actual journey to Sirius precisely as much as the unsuccessful ones did. Again, if the source says it, there is nothing to do about it, but I would request a quote from the source that explicitly says that.--62.73.72.3 (talk) 07:13, 5 October 2024 (UTC)
Our article on "assisted suicide" does not actually reflect the dictionary definition of suicide. It appears mostly to reflect medical assisted suicide, which is its own thing. Merriam Webster defines it thus: "the act of suicide carried out by someone with assistance from another person". Not strictly a medical professional. Oxford reference says: "The act of helping someone to commit suicide by giving them the means (e.g. drugs) to do so." So under not-Wikipedia's definition it is assisted suicide yes; though perhaps your comment about "voluntary euthanasia" is more accurate. There was no murder investigation and unlike the others it was not ruled as a murder after the fact. I can go look at the coroner reports if you want. Even if it is murder, no sources call it that, so we cannot call it that. Also, things kind of get weird when you're talking about mass suicide specifically.
Here is the quotation from page 242 of The Mystical Geography of Quebec:
"The 1997 transit, unlike the previous transits in 1994 and 1995, was a pure voluntary and ideologically driven group suicide". I guess I could remove "did not involve murder" but that's referred to before. PARAKANYAA (talk) 07:24, 5 October 2024 (UTC)
I rephrased this slightly. PARAKANYAA (talk) 04:01, 23 October 2024 (UTC)
'So under not-Wikipedia's definition it is assisted suicide yes' - not really. Oxford reference says assisted suicide is 'the act of helping someone to commit suicide by giving them the means (e.g. drugs) to do so'. But they didn't just 'give Druau the means' to kill herself, they literally, physically killed her with their own hands. Merriam Webster's 'definition' is more of a syntactic operation than a definition - pretty much 'assisted suicide is suicide that someone assists': this does not address the question whether killing someone on their request is a suicide at all. The fact that there was no murder investigation does not necessarily mean that no murder took place, especially when the perpetrators were dead and could not be punished anyway. The general characterisation of the event as 'a pure voluntary and ideologically driven group suicide' stresses, again, the fact that it was voluntary, which is clear, but the idea that this characterisation excludes murder hinged on the idea that murder cannot be voluntary, which is, again debatable. Perhaps we may not call it murder in the absence of sources calling it that - although IMO it is too obvious to count as OR, but OK, I suppose the very fact of our discussion proves otherwise - but explicitly claiming that it did not involve murder seems excessive. --62.73.72.3 (talk) 10:01, 20 December 2024 (UTC)
Yes, so it no longer says that, I changed it some time ago. It just says it was the only purely voluntary one, which is probably the clearest way given the sourcing (explicitly saying no murder was a somewhat tortured, if accurate, reading of the text). That they killed her is undisputed, but killing is not murder, and Wikipedia has very specific guidelines on deeming something a killing/murder/death, see WP:DEATHS. Also I have never seen a source that calls this murder, and in the absence of a conviction, murder is a judgement call on whether one consider a killing to have the requisite attributes. We can't make the judgement, since that is WP:OR, and seemingly no one else has. Personally, the idea of calling a voluntary killing murder is ludicrous - murder is not just killing somebody, it is a specific thing and requires both a lack of justifiable reason and malice. Having someone else kill you is still suicide, because you still made the choice and action to die, you're just using someone else as a tool to do it. But that gets into broader arguments than the Sirius weirdos. PARAKANYAA (talk) 10:15, 20 December 2024 (UTC)

As a reader of the article, I'd like to get an idea how old the children were when this happened. I skimmed the article and couldn't find much information about it. The word "teenagers" is used a couple of times, but that's it. Do the sources never mention their ages? — Chrisahn (talk) 20:08, 1 September 2025 (UTC)

Sources are inconsistent, so I didn't add the number. Some sources say the girl was 14 some say she was 15 (though, this may because one source is later? but it seems to not be the same with the other kids). It went youngest son (13), middle daughter (14 or 15, discrepancy), and oldest son (16). To enable their privacy, all the books use fake names in referring to them, though the news coverage did not. I am neutral but if others think it is useful I can add the ages with the discrepancy. PARAKANYAA (talk) 21:55, 1 September 2025 (UTC)
Thanks! We could add something like "the children, who were between 13 and 16 years old at the time" somewhere in the article. I think that would be enough information and a big improvement. When I first read "children" in the article, I imagined they were young kids, e.g. 5 to 10 years old or so, which would be quite a different story. — Chrisahn (talk) 00:24, 2 September 2025 (UTC)
Hm, I see that. I added "They had three teenaged children, aged 13 to 16." PARAKANYAA (talk) 00:35, 2 September 2025 (UTC)
Thanks a lot! — Chrisahn (talk) 01:12, 2 September 2025 (UTC)

I added the year to Bedat's quote, since there needs to be a distinction between Massimo Introvigne's statement in 2000 and the quotes twelve years later. The edit summary was "no this quote is from the 2012 piece, and he was re-interviewed in 2012. both quotes are from 2012".
Okay. If I identify that both Bouchard and Bedat's quotes are from 2012, will that stand? Here's a possible version:
"In 2012, Bouchard stated that he believes that the group continues to exist and still has members, however—also in 2012—Bédat said it was the "last journey of the last fanatics, those who were frustrated at not having left with the others". Though many former members continued to have contact, he said they no longer adhered to OTS ideology and that there was no more danger. He believed there was no OTS left, and that the remaining members had "returned to real life".
It's imperfect, although the recharacterization to "Bouchard stated that he believes" is a necessary change, since we can't put in wikivoice that someone 'believes' something, only that they have said that they believe something. If there's a better modification, fine - but characterizations from twelve years later need to be identified as not temporal with Introvigne's statement in 2000.  cheers. anastrophe, an editor he is. 22:20, 1 September 2025 (UTC)

That's fine, I added something like this. I see your point with addressing the year it was said (I just reverted because both Bouchard and Bedat's comments are from 2012). Does how it is now satisfy you?
Also, did anyone link this article or something? 2 separate people commenting on the talk page today surprises me. PARAKANYAA (talk) 22:26, 1 September 2025 (UTC)
Excellent, thank you very much! I've had the article on my watchlist for some time, though I don't recall how I came to it. It was the 'talk' commentary earlier today that had me taking a look through the article again.  cheers. anastrophe, an editor he is. 22:34, 1 September 2025 (UTC)
I came here indirectly via WP:ANI. :-) — Chrisahn (talk) 00:26, 2 September 2025 (UTC)
Ah, that makes sense. PARAKANYAA (talk) 00:33, 2 September 2025 (UTC)