Days before he was charged with first-degree murder, amateur boxing champion Jeremy Molitor told his long-time coach and trainer he wanted to get back in the ring.
"He seemed to be in a very good mood; he said he was going to start working out again," Silvio Fex said in a telephone interview from the Southwestern Ontario city of Sarnia last night.
Mr. Molitor will make his first court appearance today. He is charged with stabbing his girlfriend, a 21-year-old restaurant waitress, to death.
Police found Jessica Nethery's body just before noon Saturday in her red Pontiac Grand Am in an underground parking lot in Sarnia. They had received a call from a distraught man, Sarnia police Detective Sergeant Norm Hansen said.
"There's no good age for this type of death," Det. Sgt. Hansen said yesterday.
Though it appears that Ms. Nethery died of stab wounds, a full post-mortem is to begin today to pinpoint the cause and time of death, he said.
Mr. Molitor, 24, was treated in Sarnia General Hospital on Saturday before being transferred to a London, Ont., hospital for treatment by a physician specialist.
Though police are releasing few details, they did say they believe the attack on Ms. Nethery may have begun at another location, a Sarnia school for adult students. Det. Sgt. Hansen confirmed that police had retrieved a knife.
For Mr. Fex, news of the murder charge is unfathomable. "I was shocked; I couldn't believe it," he said last night.
Mr. Fex first met Mr. Molitor when he was a 12-year-old "skinny kid who played hockey."
By the age of 16, Mr. Molitor, though a good hockey player, hadn't grown like the other boys. He began boxing and excelled.
He won a gold medal at the 1998 Commonwealth Games and has captured several Canadian amateur championships. His brother Steve, 22, is the International Boxing Federation's bantamweight champion.
The pair, known as the Bruise Brothers, were to have boxed in their hometown last July. It would have been the professional debut for Mr. Molitor, a nine-time national amateur champion.
But that never happened -- it was too expensive -- and Mr. Molitor never went pro.
It seemed that Mr. Molitor was frustrated fighting under the auspices of the Canadian Amateur Boxing Association.
"You lose one fight and they write you off completely," he was quoted as saying in The Toronto Sun in May, 2001. "That's why so many fighters leave the amateur game with a bad taste in their mouth."