‘Why three bullets?’ Black victim’s family asks
REPENTIGNY, QUE. • The family of a Black man shot and killed in a Montreal suburb on Sunday wants to know why police officers opened fire.
Jean René Junior Olivier’s family told reporters gathered outside his mother’s home on Monday they had called police because they were concerned for his well-being and wanted him to get help.
Instead, they said, he received three bullets in the stomach just a few houses over from his mother’s home on a residential street in Repentigny, Que., just north of Montreal.
“I’m very angry about what happened, I called for help and they killed my son,” said Marie-mireille Bence.
“A 37-year-old man, they gunned him down, he was not dangerous. He didn’t have a gun on him, he just had a knife on him.”
The family says Olivier had discarded the knife on the ground before police shot him. If police had to shoot, they say, officers should have aimed for another part of his body.
“He threw the knife on the ground and that’s when they shot him, they shot him three times,” Bence said.
“I called for help and I lost my son. I find it absurd because there were other ways of dealing with this, of bringing him under control.”
The death has Olivier’s mother thinking twice about calling police.
“If tomorrow I have another problem, will I call 911? Not at all, because I do not have confidence in the police,” Bence said.
Quebec’s police watchdog, which began an investigation, said officers responded to a 911 call just after 7:30 a.m. that morning about an unstable man armed with a knife.
They said police found the man outside and tried to speak to him but he ran and allegedly became threatening toward officers. The watchdog said police first used pepper spray and then shot him multiple times.
Montreal-based civil rights group Center for Research-action on Race Relations is assisting the family.
Executive director Fo Niemi told reporters the Repentigny police force has been criticized for the way it has treated Black residents.
City police have been hit with at least four complaints for racial profiling before the province’s human rights commission.
Repentigny police held a news conference Monday and said it was the first such police shooting death in the force’s history.
“We understand this event has shaken our community — our police officers as well as the family of the victim to whom we offer our sincere and profound condolences,” police Chief Helen Dion told reporters.
Kayshawn Olivier, one of the victim’s sons, said he has only one question for authorities.
“All we want is answers,” he said. “The question is why three bullets?”