Two American Men Charged With Homicides Of Computer Animation Pioneer Daniel Langlois And Partner
Two American men have been arrested and charged in the horrific killing of Canadian computer animation pioneer and Softimage founder Daniel Langlois, 66, and his partner, Dominique Marchand. The men are accused of ambushing Langlois and Marchand, shooting them to death, and then setting their car on fire.
One of the men arrested was Langlois’s neighbor Jonathan Scott Lehrer, a businessman who owned the chocolate plantation Bois Collette. The other person, Robert Snider, is alleged to be the hitman. The men will remain in custody until a hearing in March 2024. Lehrer’s wife, Victoria, and a local unnamed Dominican man were also questioned by police but currently remain free.
Langlois and Lehrer were embroiled in a long-running legal battle over access to a public road. Lehrer was accused of deliberately obstructing access to the road to prevent people from reaching the Coulibri Ridge eco-resort, a sustainable off-grid 200-acre development that Langlois and Marchand had spent decades developing and building.
Langlois and Marchand had only opened their resort last year. They had originally planned to launch in 2017, but delayed their plans after Hurricane Maria devastated the island.
“We put our plans on hold to help the local communities rebuild and ultimately created the Resilient Dominica Project (REZDM),” Langlois said in an interview. Their REZDM project helped fund the reconstruction of the local primary school, construct a new jetty that would provide more options during emergency evacuations, and started an environmental effort to stop coral tissue loss in the local marine reserve.
In court documents from 2019, Lehrer’s tactics for blocking access to the public road were described as such:
[O]the past four to five years the defendants have been causing interference with the unobstructed and free use of the public road culminating in October 2018 when on the 18th day of that month the first named defendant blocked the road by placing boulders across the road, digging a trench across the said road, erecting metal pipes and placing equipment and supplies on the road denying the claimants and their employees access to their property.
Just a couple weeks after the incident described above, employees at Langlois’s then-unopened resort staged a protest on the road due to not being able to safely reach their jobs, according to a story in Dominica News Online:
[A] land owner from Bois Cutlette blocked the government road, and created a diversion on his private land which he claims he had permission to do. The residents, most of whom are employees at Petite Coulibri, have been unable to pass safely to get to work, and decided to protest the action of the land owner.
Tripadvisor reviews of the chocolate plantation further reveal that the harassment and intimidation by the Lehrers was not limited to Langlois but to anyone who drove down the public road.
The chocolate maker’s website explains that Lehrer did more than sell chocolate; he was also an authorized government representative for selling citizenship to Dominica through investment. In addition, he sold plots of land to preppers planning for global disaster. Says his website: “If the outside world has a major disruption, whether it be political, economic, prolonged natural disaster, or for a variety of other reasons shuts down tomorrow, 150 savvy investors will always have a safe haven and the ability to live peacefully at Bois Cotlette.”
To learn more about Langlois’s tremendous contributions to the development of cg animation, read our obituary. Below you can listen to a statement on the deaths of Langlois and Marchand by local politician Denise Charles-Pemberton:
