Montreal police have opened an investigation into a particularly disturbing case of road rage that occurred this Monday, in the Hochelaga-Maisonneuve district. A young driver aged 20, who saw his car being pushed into a ditch near the railway tracks, however escaped unhurt.
According to initial information from the Montreal City Police Service (SPVM), the event occurred around 1 p.m. on rue Notre-Dame Est, very close to the intersection with rue Alphonse-D.-Roy.
Upon their arrival, the police located an SUV type vehicle which had been “overturned in the ditch” very close to the Canadian Pacific railway tracks, indicated agent Jean-Pierre Brabant, spokesperson for the SPVM.
According to a police source, the investigators’ main hypothesis is that it is a case of road rage that has degenerated. Given the force of the impact, everything indicates that the other driver, who left the scene after the collision and before the arrival of the police, 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 start of the evening. Video tapes from nearby surveillance cameras would need to be viewed by law enforcement in order to identify the vehicle.
At the time of the incident, the two vehicles were traveling westbound on Notre-Dame Street, the collision having 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 congestion at the dawn of rush hour. The perimeter was lifted at the end of the afternoon.
Focus on the phenomenon
Provincially, the Sûreté du Québec (SQ) recorded 171 cases of road rage from January to November 2023, the majority of which ended without injury (123) or with minor injuries (45).
Last year, in 2022, the police force recorded 186 road rage cases, compared to 210 in 2021, 165 in 2020, 174 in 2019, 182 in 2018 and 173 in 2017. Only one death is attributable to one of these files; it occurred in 2022.
According to the SQ, this data must be interpreted with caution, since it “certainly underestimates the real portrait since the road rage indicator can be extracted from our information systems only when there is a registered victim. on file.”
“Consequently, offenses which do not allow a victim to be registered (examples: dangerous driving without collision, reckless driving, vehicle mischief, etc.) cannot be counted in the road rage data,” specify the forces order on this subject.
With William Leclerc, The Press