Danny Paul, from Point St. Charles, was born in 1969 and died 26 years later in a particularly noteworthy fashion as a combatant in the biker war.His death was devastating for his mother who adored her son but was forced to watch helplessly while circumstances conspired to turn him from a sweet little big-eyed boy to a biker gang member ready to kill for his crew.
Michele Paul put pen to paper to analyze her family's spiral in her 2016 book They would never do that to you.
The short book, available in both French and English, shines a light on her son's destructive quest for purpose after a lifetime of being too often-neglected and unappreciated.
Danny was a sensitive and loving young boy who cared deeply about others, almost to a fault.
One time, his mother notes, he gave her guitar away to a poor child because he felt sorry him. She found it impossible to scold him for his act of generosity and caring.
The well-liked boy was always smiling while busying himself with such tasks as collecting bottles to get refunds.
When his grandmother died, Danny wept uncontrollably, even though she and Danny's grandfather had always been at best indifferent to their grandson. Danny's father had left the family while he was still a toddler.
His maternal grandparents also failed to show him much care and the neglect was compounded by violence when a boy named Romeo Bonnomme spent four years picking on him.
It ended when Bonhomme, who was related to the well-known Lee family in Point St. Charles, was killed in a car accident while on summer vacation.
Danny had conflicted feelings about it.
"He said he didn't mean to be happy about it but had a strange feeling of relief, now breathing as if his lungs had relaxed or opened up," his mother Michele Paul tells Coolopolis.
Paul went through a rough patch around the age of 18 and survived an attempt at grievous self-harm but things turned around when he was hired onto a construction crew where he thrived as a sandblaster.
But once again Paul's quest to earn approval from other men proved counterproductive.
He found himself working harder and faster than others. He ended up hurting his back.
He then returned to work too fast and aggravated his herniated disc but this time his boss contested his workers compensation, leading him without any significant income.
Soon Paul found himself courted by the Rock Machine biker gang, led by Salvatore Cazzetta.
Paul, and many other young men like him, were seduced and indoctrinated into the drug-selling tribe.
The top dogs of the biker gang preyed on their quest for belonging and search for a larger family.
Paul's life - like so many others - ended in his futile death as a participant in the biker war.
In September 1995 Paul was tasked with the responsibility of delivering a bomb to a rival Hells Angels clubhouse.
One of the rival bikers inside the Hells Angels bunker spotted Paul walking towards the bunker on the CCTV camera.The biker pulled out a gun and shot the bomb.
The explosive blew up and Paul died immediately.
A Hells Angels bikers later came out and picked up part of Paul's skeleton and kept it in the clubhouse freezer as a trophy keepsake.
As if to prove that the biker war was entirely pointless, Paul's leader Cazzetta later simply switched over to join the dreaded rival Hells Angels.
Michele Paul doesn't spend much of her time recounting her son's activities within the gang.
"I loved Danny but I didn't love what he was doing," she says.
"A lot of these boys were used and exploited by those biker gang leaders. So many hearts were broken," says Michele Paul.