The Montreal police have opened an investigation into a particularly disturbing case of road violence that occurred this Monday in the Hochelaga-Maisonneuve district. However, a young driver aged 20 who saw his car being pushed into a ditch near the railway tracks escaped unhurt.
Posted at 5:27 p.m.
According to initial information from the Montreal City Police Service (SPVM), the incident occurred around 1 p.m. on Rue Notre-Dame Est, very close to the intersection with Rue Alphonse-D.-Roy.
Upon arrival, police discovered an SUV “overturned in a ditch” near the Canadian Pacific train tracks, according to SPVM spokesman Agent Jean-Pierre Brabant.
According to a police source, investigators’ main hypothesis is that this is a degenerate case of road rage. Given the force of the impact, everything indicates that the other driver, who left the scene after the collision and before the police arrived, voluntarily drove into his victim’s vehicle. The car then fell upside down into the ditch.
Fortunately, the driver, a young man of 20, was not injured and was not taken to hospital. However, he was met by investigators.
The suspect was still actively sought by the police at the beginning of the evening. To identify the vehicle, law enforcement would need to view video footage from nearby surveillance cameras.
At the time of the incident, the two vehicles were traveling westbound on Notre-Dame Street and the collision occurred just before the intersection. The SPVM had to close Notre-Dame Street westbound from Bourbonnière Avenue for nearly two hours on Monday, causing significant traffic congestion at the start of rush hour. At the end of the afternoon the restriction was lifted.
Focus on the phenomenon
At the provincial level, the Sûreté du Québec (SQ) recorded 171 cases of road violence from January to November 2023, most of which resulted in no injury (123) or minor injuries (45).
Last year, in 2022, police recorded 186 cases of road rage, compared to 210 in 2021, 165 in 2020, 174 in 2019, 182 in 2018 and 173 in 2017. Only one death is recorded return one of these files; it happened in 2022.
According to the SQ, this data must be interpreted with caution as it “certainly underestimates the real picture, as the road violence indicator can only be extracted from our information systems if there is a registered victim.”
“Consequently, crimes for which it is not possible To a victim (examples: dangerous driving without collision, reckless driving, vehicle accident, etc.) cannot be taken into account in the data on traffic accidents,” the police order said this topic.
With William Leclerc, La Presse