Suspect called 911 after attack
More details on death of Warrant Officer Patrice Vincent.
For more than two hours, passersby had seen Martin Rouleau lying in wait. Driving an unassuming beige Nissan Altima, the 25-year-old is believed to have pulled into the parking lot of a St-Jean-sur-Richelieu strip mall just after 9 a.m. Monday and had stayed there for most of the morning.
If Mr. Rouleau, a resident of the Quebec city of 92,000, was looking to catch a uniformed Canadian soldier off guard, this place was as good as any.
Royal Military College St. Jean is only a 30-minute walk away, as is the city’s St-Jean Garrison, home to the Canadian Forces Leadership and Recruit School.
Most days, the strip mall’s Service Canada location is host to Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) members clad in green operational dress. From his spot in the parking lot, Mr. Rouleau would have had an unobstructed view of the front door and sidewalk.
Only a few weeks before, the recent convert to militant Islam had been stripped of his passport while trying to travel to Turkey.
His radical Facebook posts had swiftly brought him to the attention of federal authorities, who barred him from leaving the country on suspicion he would join Islamist State of Iraq and Al-Sham fighters in Iraq or Syria.
In the Royal Canadian Mounted Police’s most recent meeting with him, he had apparently shown signs of turning a corner on his terrorist ambitions. Instead, he is now accused of planning to use his midsized car to wage jihad at home.
Specifically, he may have been responding to a September request by ISIS’s English-speaking spokesman to “kill a disbelieving American or European … or an Australian, or a Canadian … and kill him in any manner or way however it may be.”
The RC MP and the Sûreté du Québec (SQ) are still hesitant to say exactly why Mr. Rouleau staged his parking lot stakeout, but it was just before noon he allegedly saw his target: Three people, all soldiers, but only two in CAF uniform. As the beige sedan tore toward the group just as they stepped off the sidewalk, an unidentified woman in the trio was able to jump clear, Quebec media report.
The brunt of the collision was taken by Warrant Officer Patrice Vincent, a 28-year CAF veteran who died of his injuries. A second victim, who was not in uniform, was less severely hurt and remains in stable condition in hospital.
The Nissan then sped away, turning right onto Boulevard du Seminaire and heading south toward the U.S. border.
As initial reports indicate, witnesses had no reason to suspect it was anything other than an accidental hit and run. But as shocked bystanders dialed 911, the fleeing Mr. Rouleau did the same. In the opening seconds of his attempted escape, the SQ has confirmed, he called a 911 dispatcher to claim responsibility for the attack and boast he had done it “in the name of Allah.”
A St-Jean-sur-Richelieu police officer on patrol nearby immediately gave chase. The pursuit would only take four kilometres, though, before the Nissan came on a hasty police roadblock set up across all three lanes of Seminaire. The driver attempted to swerve around a police spike strip and careered into a ditch, flipping the vehicle onto its roof.
Mr. Rouleau emerged from the upturned vehicle through a window clutching a large knife. A La Presse photographer snapped the knife discarded on the ground — it is decorated with the head of an eagle and with the word “Mexico” on the blade.
The suspect refused police demands to drop the weapon. When he reportedly charged at an officer, he was hit by a fusillade of pistol fire.
Hit multiple times, Mr. Rouleau collapsed and was officially pronounced dead several hours later in hospital.