For Greg Matters, life ended on home soil, despite surviving military service in Afghanistan.
Matters was shot to death Monday night in Prince George after a long standoff with police.
He was no stranger to police or the courts, with a scattering of appearances related to assault and uttering threats.
He was consistently in conflict with people in his life and law enforcement, at least since his return from military duty.
Friends said he was suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. He agreed with that and openly discussed his psychiatric medical attention, and the debilitating symptoms the condition caused him.
The image from family and friends about Matters was that he was a clear product of his home environment. He had close bonds with his family, many friends, respectful neighbours, and a long history of farming in the Pineview area southeast of the city.
Sources said he and his mother Lorraine lived in the family farmhouse. His brother Trevor is a small business owner in Prince George, while his sister Tracey visited as often as she could from her job in the civil service in Australia.
Tracey is due to arrive Wednesday at 8 p.m. into a large, grieving circle of loved ones.
It was Tracey who would speak for the family, said a number of contacts.
One of them was next door neighbour Vern Johnson, who made it clear that he had positive feelings for the Matters family in general, and would not comment directly about the incident.
Other friends and relations took to social media with messages of shock, grief, and some with venom for the police.
There were descriptions of a dramatic confrontation between Matters and his brother, both men aggressively driving vehicles around the Pineview property, with one vehicle ending up in the ditch. It was this that originally brought police, said those close to the issue.
After that it became a standoff with RCMP, made remarkable by Matters waving an axe at attending officers.
Despite the assumptions expressed online, the exact reasons a bullet fatally struck Matters is still undisclosed. The RCMP's and Matters's combined actions are under the microscope of the all-civilian Independent Investigations Office. There are prescribed times when any armed peace officer may discharge his/her weapon at a person, and it is not yet clear if proper procedures were or were not followed.
