Young couple’s troubled lives end with their untimely deaths

GILFORD — Ten years ago, Christian St. Cyr’s main goal was to do good in class and focus on his grades at Gilford High School, where he was a junior.

“I just want to make my parents happy and stay out of trouble. I don’t want them to have to worry about me,” he said in an article in printed Dec. 31, 2009, in the Gilford Steamer weekly newspaper.

Tragically, life for St. Cyr took a very different turn.

St. Cyr, along with his wife, Brandie Tarantino, was found dead in the room of a Manchester motel where police had been engaged in a 15-hour standoff with man who ultimately died in an exchange of gunfire with police.

St. Cyr and Tarantino were found in a room in the Quality Inn hours after last Thursday’s shooting. While the cause of their deaths remains unknown pending results of toxicology tests, neither showed evidence of gunshot wounds or internal injuries, according to the state Attorney General’s Office.

In recent years both had accumulated criminal records that included charges of drug possession. In addition St. Cyr had a record for burglary, theft, and weapons offenses.

At the time of their deaths, there was an active warrant for St. Cyr’s arrest. Following his arrest last August in Manchester on a felony drug possession charge, the Belknap County Attorney’s office petitioned the Superior Court to impose suspended sentences he had received in 2016 for felony charges, including forgery and being a felon in possession of a dangerous weapon.

The year before St. Cyr pleaded guilty to those charges, he listed himself as unemployed, according to court records.

Judge James D. O’Neill issued the warrant for St. Cyr’s arrest on Jan. 15.

Tarantino pleaded guilty to a downgraded drug possession charge in 2016 and received a suspended 12-month sentence which required, among other things, that she stay out of trouble for two years. However, she was accused of violating the terms of her probation last August for failing to inform probation officers that she had been contacted by Manchester police involving “known felons and illegal drugs.”

Back in St. Cyr’s high school days he played football and lacrosse and was active in the Gilford High School snowboarding club.

According to his obituary, St. Cyr “loved to sail and snowboard and was quick with sarcasm and a smile. He loved things smaller than him and cried when he killed his first squirrel.”