(Montreal) A 74-year-old homeless man died Monday evening in Montreal, when extreme cold hit the region.
Police officers from the Service de police de la Ville de Montréal (SPVM) responded to a call about a man possibly in a hypothermic situation. The man lived in a camp between rue Saint-Jacques and highway 20, in the Notre-Dame-de-Grâce sector.
When they arrived at the scene, the police had the man transferred to a hospital, where he was declared dead.
The file was turned over to the Coroner’s Office.
The cold worries homeless support organizations, who are at risk by spending the night outside as the mercury plummets.
Doctor Horacio Arruda, who announced his resignation as national director of public health in Quebec on Monday evening, called earlier in the evening to organizations helping homeless people to ignore COVID-19 for the next few nights.
He had thus asked the shelters to open their dormitories “according to the capacity established before the pandemic, and this, regardless of the outbreak status of the environment”.
This message had been well received in the community setting, where we were already on high alert in the evening when the temperature was dropping rapidly.