The hospital worker and the itinerant: two deaths by police bullets shock city

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This article was published 08/06/2011 (5288 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

MONTREAL – Right until that last, violent instant, they were two men who lived vastly different lives.

One was known as the punctual, dependable hospital technician — the easygoing, joke-telling ventilation specialist who never had a problem with his bosses.

The other man struggled with mental issues — slept in a boarding house, collected discarded cans for income, and took medication to keep his inner demons under control.

Those lives converged at the end, in a hail of police gunfire.

There were expressions of shock and anger Wednesday after Montreal police bullets killed Mario Hamel, 40, and Patrick Limoges, 36, during a downtown disturbance the previous morning.

The trouble began when Hamel, wandering the streets, allegedly brandished a knife and tossed around trash containers. Limoges, who was on his way to work, was an innocent bystander.

An anti-police march turned rowdy later Wednesday, in a city where anti-police marches have a history of spiralling into rowdy, window-smashing affairs.

Up to 200 protestors, many clad in black or wearing bandannas, paused at the shooting scene and chanted slogans. Some later picked up materials from a construction site and hurled objects like bricks and chunks of concrete at about a dozen store windows, smashing several.

There was also a quieter demonstration earlier in the day outside the hospital where Limoges worked. Friends dropped bouquets of flowers, left written messages and held a moment of silence. Some of Limoges’ family members also made a pilgrimage to the site.

The flowers covered what was left of the bloodstains on the sidewalk.

“When you come in to work, you come in to work — not to die on a sidewalk,” said Gilles Girard, a colleague and union rep at the Hopital St-Luc.

“You don’t imagine dying like that. A stray bullet.”

He said Limoges had worked at the hospital for three years, had a pristine work record, and was quick with a laugh.

An investigation is under way to determine what happened on Tuesday morning — why police felt the need to fire upon Hamel, and how they allowed an innocent bystander into that line of fire.

One criminologist said he can’t recall the last time an innocent bystander was killed, in Canada, by a police bullet.

“Literally, the chances are something along the lines of being hit by lightning — it’s just that rare,” said Michael Kempa, a University of Ottawa professor.

Quebec’s public safety minister underscored that point, leaping to the defence of the police as it fell under heavy scrutiny.

The Montreal force has been involved in several shooting incidents this year.

The Quebec government website says 72 people in the province have been killed or seriously injured by a bullet during police operations since 1999. In a bizarre twist, late Wednesday, Quebec provincial police shot an allegedly violent man in Rawdon, Que.; his lower-body injuries were not considered life-threatening.

Public Security Minister Robert Dutil noted, however, that only 60 police officers — out of 15,000 across Quebec — ever fire a weapon in an average year.

“So it happened (with) only one of 200 policemen each year,” Dutil told reporters in Quebec City.

“A police officer in his career is very unlikely to have fired a gun. What I’m trying to say is there’s no pattern.

“I believe they’re well-trained. I believe they’re well equipped. I believe they do their best. Unfortunately, in a society like ours, this kind of thing happens. We wish it wouldn’t.”

The way it happened Tuesday, according to two witnesses, was police pleaded with Hamel to drop a knife.

Claude Vincent was laying carpets in a building across the street and rushed to the window when he heard shouts.

“It was the police screaming. They were telling the man with the knife, ‘Drop your knife! Drop your knife!’ ” Vincent said.

Police chased the man for at least 200 metres, according to Vincent. They even tried pepper-spraying him.

“They must have emptied a whole canister (of pepper spray) on him,” Vincent said. “But (Hamel) continued on his path. That’s when they fired on him.”

He and another witness said they heard three shots. One media report suggested there might have been several more.

Vincent said police appeared to handle the incident professionally — although, he confessed, he didn’t see what happened with the bystander.

And in the next breath, he expressed surprise at how the incident ended: “I didn’t expect them to shoot him.”

Authorities were tight-lipped Wednesday.

Montreal city hall expressed its sadness at the incident but refused to comment, pending an investigation.

The local police force also issued a statement expressing its condolences but, again, it refused to say anything else because of the ongoing provincial police investigation.

The provincial government said there might be changes to the procedure involving police investigations.

The government is awaiting a report into the 2008 police shooting of teenager Fredy Villanueva and, then, could proceed with reforms.

Quebec’s current protocol is to have one police force investigate another whenever someone is injured in an operation.

This model has come under fire because, detractors say, it lacks transparency and favours the officer under investigation.

For instance, the Villanueva inquiry revealed that the protocol for interrogating police officers following a shooting was ignored.

The officers involved were given ample time to speak with each other before being interrogated — meaning they could, in theory, have had time to co-ordinate their stories.

Dutil said he’s looking at Ontario’s Special Investigations Unit as a potential model, although he says there are concerns with that system as well.

“It’s also policemen making investigations on policemen,” Dutil said of Ontario’s system.

Others warn that Montreal’s tragedy revealed broader problems — namely, the way our society deals with mental health.

The men’s shelter that was home to Hamel says it is under-funded and struggles to provide the care its residents need.

And Kempa, the criminologist, says that while police in Canada are generally good at dealing with things like organized crime, there are real gaps in dealing with confrontations involving the mentally ill.

A specialist in police accountability, Kempa says officers are increasingly asked intervene in situations they’re not trained to handle.

He said police lack skills in how to deal with things like mental-health issues and interpersonal disputes, even though they are asked to do it more and more.

“When you send people who have the wrong tools into those situations… they don’t have anything else really to do other than use force,” said the Ottawa professor.

He laid some of the blame on the recent economic downturn, which has prompted cuts to police budgets in districts across North America.

Still, he said officers — young and old — don’t reach for their sidearms as often as citizens think.

“Basically, the public greatly overestimates how often police officers use, or even draw, their weapons,” he said.

Most officers will go five or even 10 years, he said, without pulling out their firearms.

But a boarding-house neighbour of Hamel’s said none of that excuses what happened Tuesday.

The man named Steve, who said he knew Hamel for two years and lived on the same floor, remembered him as a quiet, detached neighbour.

He said Hamel had “very light” psychological troubles, which appeared to be under control when he took medication.

“When he spoke he made sense — he wasn’t completely out of it,” said Steve, who declined to give his last name.

“He was never aggressive — never! I talked with him often.”

He said Hamel often spoke about his three children and former spouse.

Steve cut short his conversation with a reporter upon being scolded by someone else at the boarding house. But before going he shared his thoughts about what happened Tuesday.

“It was really deplorable,” he said. “They didn’t think before acting.”