The mother of Jean René Junior Olivier, this black man shot dead by police in Repentigny in 2021, intends to prove the fault of the City of Repentigny and its agents in the death of her son and claims $ 430,000 in damages from them.
“We have reason to believe that if Jean René Junior Olivier had been a white person, he would still be alive today,” said Marie Mireille Bence’s lawyer, Me Wilerne Bernard, at a press conference, Tuesday.
The filing of this lawsuit follows the decision of the Director of Criminal and Penal Prosecutions (DPCP), announced earlier this month, not to file criminal charges against the police officers involved in the case.
1er August 2021, Marie Mireille Bence called the emergency services because of her son’s state of psychological instability.
While she was expecting medical intervention to help her, it was instead six police officers and an ambulance that she saw appearing in front of her home.
The intervention, “incredibly violent” according to the lawsuit filed on Tuesday, ended when Jean René Junior Olivier was fatally shot by three bullets.
However, the DPCP concluded “the police intervention was legal and was based mainly on the duty imposed on the police officers to ensure, from the first moments until the end of the sequence of shootings, the safety of the citizens under their protection as well as than their own safety.
Remember that issues of racial profiling have made headlines many times in Repentigny in recent years.
In 2020, a group of nine black youths received tickets totaling $11,500 for violating sanitary measures on a basketball court. The same evening, on the same field, a group of young whites had received a warning.
The following year, a report showed that black people were nearly three times more likely than white people to be arrested by the Repentigny City Police Department.
Last summer, a black man won his case before the Human Rights Tribunal for being the victim of profiling after being arrested while driving a luxury vehicle.
With Lila Dussault, The Pressand The Canadian Press