A 21-year-old Notre Dame de Grace man was wounded and another man is in police custody after a drug bust ended in a gunfight yesterday afternoon. The incident occurred at 4:35 as police from Montreal's narcotics unit, backed up by the tactical squad, were arresting two men standing on a sidewalk on St. Jacques St., just west of West Broadway St. Police arrested one man in his 20s on the scene. The other man fled on foot. There was an exchange of gunfire and the man was found in an alleyway, Montreal police said. He was listed in critical condition at Montreal General Hospital last night. The Surete du Quebec is investigating the shooting. [end]
Released On Bail. Brossard Man Shot, Killed Laval Cop During A Raid On His Home In March After being released from the detention centre where he was held for weeks after killing a police officer, Basil Parasiris apologized to the victim's family. Parasiris faces a charge of first-degree murder in the March 2 death of Laval police Constable Daniel Tessier. The accused was granted bail Monday; it is believed to be the first time someone charged with the first-degree murder of a police officer in Canada has been freed on bail. [continues 453 words]
'Relieved, Saddened'; Judge Critical of Police Raid In a decision believed to be the first of its kind in Canada, a Quebec Superior Court judge has granted bail to a person accused of murdering a police officer. But in rendering his decision at the Montreal courthouse yesterday, Justice Jean-Guy Boilard noted the first-degree murder case against Basil Parasiris, 41, carries with it several exceptional circumstances. "I won't say it is weak," Boilard noted of the case, "but it is contestable." [continues 1262 words]
Suspect may be first to be released while charged with murdering constable, lawyer says MONTREAL -- A Montreal businessman awaiting trial for the first-degree murder of a police officer has won bail after the court heard that the accused thought he was the victim of a home invasion when drug investigators burst into his house in a pre-dawn raid. In what is believed to be a Canadian first, Mr. Justice Jean-Guy Boilard of the Quebec Superior Court yesterday ordered the release on bail of Basil Parasiris, 41, saying that it would not affect the public trust in the justice system. [continues 437 words]
Six Gatineau high school students are facing drug charges after police seized marijuana and hashish near a Hull high school yesterday. Gatineau police said the six students, ranging in age from 14 to 19 years old, were arrested during the lunch break near Ecole Secondaire Mont-Bleu. Police said five of the students are facing drug possession charges, while one is charged with possession of hashish for the purposes of trafficking. Police said yesterday's arrests mark the sixth time in six weeks that police have cracked down on drug activity near Gatineau schools. [end]
Project OMNI Tries To Stem Tide Of Violence In West End As far as Sylvain Brouillette is concerned, summer began sometime in January. Traditionally, street gangs in Montreal are more active during the summer months. But to Brouillette, the Montreal police chief inspector responsible for the western part of the city, incidents of extreme street -gang violence began all too early this year. Five homicides and five attempted murders have been attributed to street-gang activity already this year in such areas as LaSalle, Lachine and Notre Dame de Grace. Included among those numbers was the first homicide of the year, in Lachine, and the slaying of Tyler Jacobs, 16, in N.D.G. [continues 314 words]
She Fell Unconscious After Drugs Found: Surete A 43-year-old woman died in police custody early Saturday in St. Zotique, about 60 kilometres west of Montreal. Montreal police have taken over the investigation of the death, which occurred while Surete du Quebec officers were executing a search warrant for a house on rue Principale in the course of an investigation into a drug network. Just before midnight, the woman showed up at the home. Police searched her and found drugs, but when they tried to arrest her she fell unconscious for unknown reasons, Montreal police said. [continues 82 words]
Accidental Pricking Highlights Chomedey South's Problematic Area Chomedey South is often seen as a paradox, as young families with children co-exist alongside urban problems like prostitution and drug usae and peddling. However, the area's problems were highlighted following an incident last week, when a little girl pricked herself with a discarded needle. Seven-year-old Marie-Jane was walking to her bus stop on 79th Avenue on March 27 when she found the syringe in some nearby bushes. "I was really curious, I wanted to play doctor," Marie-Jane said. "I showed it to all my friends but some of them said I shouldn't play with that. But I stung myself two times with it, I didn't bleed." [continues 648 words]
Stats Reassuring. Accidental Prickings Rarely Lead To Infection The case of the 7-year-old Laval girl who pricked herself Tuesday with a syringe found in a hedge left many people gasping in horror. The reassuring news is the chance of contracting HIV or hepatitis B or C from such incidents is extremely rare. There are no documented cases of anyone contracting HIV or hepatitis B after being pricked with needles left in parks or in alleys, said Carole Morissette of the Montreal Public Health Department. The literature is less clear in the case of hepatitis C, though it appears that there, too, the risk is remote, she said. [continues 304 words]
More than 2,500 policemen and policewomen from across Quebec, Canada and the United States descended upon the St-Vincentde- Paul Church in Laval on March 9 to attend the moving funeral of a fellow policeman. Laval Detective-Sergent. Daniel Tessier, 42, died in the early-morning hours of March 2 following a raid gone wrong in Brossard. A slow procession began at around 11:40 a.m. with thousands of police personnel from across North America walking in silence. The nearby College Laval auditorium was a welcome refuge for the several hundred police who could not enter the church. [continues 628 words]
Gatineau police arrested 13 Nicolas-Gatineau secondary school students and another teen in a drug sweep during the lunch hour yesterday. Twelve boys and two girls between the ages of 14 and 17 were arrested off school property, police said. A small quantity of marijuana was seized. Thirteen of the teens face possible charges of drug possession, while one was being questioned about trafficking, police said. Police said the arrests resulted from a partnership with the de la Verendrye Boulevard school, and because of complaints from residents and businesses in the area. It was the second drug sweep at a Gatineau high school in a week. Six students were arrested in a similar police operation at du Versant secondary school on March 15. [end]
Social Club Was HQ For Mob Bosses: Files A small St. Leonard cafe was the headquarters and the centre of money distribution for Montreal's top five Italian Mafia bosses, who took a cut of every drug-trafficking and illegal-gambling dollar made by their gang members, according to court documents. The cafe is a modest, sparsely furnished storefront business where an elderly Italian gentleman makes an excellent espresso allonge. But police allege that for years some of Montreal's - and indeed Canada's - - most powerful underworld figures made this coffee bar the centre of their criminal empire. [continues 1926 words]
The lead came in almost overnight, and the intimate details of the crime, yet to be revealed in the press, had homicide detectives on the hunt early on for a suspect they still can't find. Detectives working the Gatineau parking-lot slaying of 27-year-old Kelly Morrisseau got the remarkable tip early on in the probe: The young mother, pregnant with another child, was killed over a handful of crack cocaine. The tip came from an informant in a Vanier neighbourhood known for its street prostitution and crack houses. It was Ms. Morrisseau's neighbourhood, and on its streets she occasionally sold her body for sex along Deschamps and Lafontaine streets. [continues 383 words]
McGill's Harm Reduction Centre will host the first annual meeting of Canadian Students for Sensible Drug Policy (CSSDP) this weekend. Speakers and student activists from across Canada and the U.S. will discuss domestic and international drug policies, harm reduction and policy reform initiatives, as well as setting up other CSSDP chapters across Canada. Students for Sensible Drug Policy, an international grassroots organization founded in 2003, is presently forming Canadian chapters in Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver. The McGill conference will develop terms for a national mandate and hold elections for the first ever board of directors for Canadian SSDP branches. [continues 220 words]
"It was a really, really stupid thing to do," said a family friend who lives a few streets over from where Laval morality and drug squad officer Daniel Tessier, 42, was shot and killed March 2 during a botched raid in an affluent area of Brossard on the South Shore. "[The police] were looking for trouble." Constable Tessier was part of a 13-man team attempting a pre-dawn raid on the Rimouski Crescent home of Basile Parasiris, part of a co-ordinated effort timed with simultaneous raids in Laval, the result of a nine-month investigation into a drug trafficking ring. While the exact sequence of events has yet to be made public, it is alleged that Parasiris shot Tessier in the head after police stormed the house. Parasiris's wife Penny and two young children - aged 6 and 15 - were in the home at the time. She was wounded in the exchange, as was Constable Stephane Forbes. No drugs were found. [continues 713 words]
RCMP Took Cash From Basement Hiding Spot During its three-year investigation of the Italian Mafia in Montreal, the RCMP secretly broke into cars, homes and safes of alleged drug dealers and bookmakers, seizing millions of dollars in cash and sowing dissent and confusion among gangsters that almost led to a homicide. On the night of Sept. 14, 2006, the RCMP, acting on a search warrant, broke into a Laval home belonging to the parents of a suspected drug trafficker and seized $2.9 million. [continues 699 words]
The ill-fated drug raid on Basile Parisiris's home where two policemen were shot, one fatally, is just another of the consequences that Canadians are suffering because of the government's embracing U.S.-style methods of policing in the "war on drugs." Surely we deserve better than this. The U.S. has shown the way not to deal with personal drug use. To follow that example is utter stupidity. Bruce Symington Medicine Hat, Alta. [end]
Laval's police chief is taking the media to task for coming to their own conclusions about what happened inside a Brossard home where one of his officers was gunned down last week. In an open letter to the media, Jean-Pierre Gariepy said his police force was surprised by the decision of some outlets to recreate the series of events inside the house where Constable Daniel Tessier, 42, was shot dead during a March 2 drug raid. The Federation of Municipal Police Officers also voiced those sentiments this week, calling the images of bloodstained walls tactless and sensationalist. [continues 294 words]
"First of all," Surete du Quebec spokesperson Richard Gagne says, "they were fake uniforms. ... Based on the description we had from the victims, these were not police uniforms. "They were jackets you can buy in any store that sells security uniforms. Anybody can pick them up and they aren't legally controlled. "They could have got their badges at Toys 'R Us." Any other time, it would seem like a straightforward story. On Tuesday, four men dressed in what appeared to be provincial police uniforms burst into a house in St. Agapit, about a half-hour's drive south of Quebec City. They handcuffed the occupants, searched the place, then left. [continues 481 words]
Inside Quebec
