When guns are put into the hands of teenagers
On March 28, Mehdi Moussaoui and Jason ((first name changed to protect the person's anonymity) lost their lives in a car accident in the Rosemont neighborhood of Montreal. They were 14 and 16 years old respectively. The deaths of these two teenagers shook the neighborhoods of Saint-Léonard and Montréal-Nord, where they lived.
Around 5:30am on March 28, while many Montrealers were still asleep, several gunshots rang out. Witnesses quickly report a car whose occupants are shooting at other vehicles. A 41-year-old man was injured in the shoulder while behind the wheel of his car, while a second, aged 58, escaped unscathed. A police officer then engages in a chase before “losing sight” of the suspicious car. It was finally found a few streets away, after having hit a tree.
Astonishment! The first police officer on the scene discovered two teenagers in the vehicle. “Following the impact, the death of one of the occupants was pronounced at the scene; the other occupant was allegedly transported to a hospital center, where he was pronounced dead. Five members of the BEI have been tasked with investigating the circumstances surrounding the intervention,” says the Bureau of Independent Investigations (BEI). According to the first elements of the investigation, the young people probably targeted cars at random. No link could be established between the victims and the adolescents or between the victims themselves.
If the hypothesis of an initiation is mentioned by the police, the entourage and community actors in the neighborhoods where these young people lived are convinced of it: Mehdi and Jason were drawn into a spiral due to bad influences, from which they could have been saved.
Faced with this new drama of gun violence and the young age of the protagonists, La Converse looked at what pushes some adolescents to plunge into a tunnel of violence.
Unarmed parents
Illegal sales, 3D printer manufacturing, glorification on social networks — guns are now within the reach of young Montrealers. A reality that worries parents in sensitive neighborhoods more and more, while dramas are multiplying.
Still in shock, Jason's mother prefers to keep her son's identity secret and protect her family's anonymity for the time being. A choice that explains the media silence around Jason, which created discomfort in the black community. The spotlight was indeed on Mehdi, his junior by two years, whose father spoke publicly.
This bereaved mother, whom we will call Yolande, however, confides her distress to La Converse. “They're not just thugs with no parents or values, that's not true. They are kids who have met the wrong people. They were manipulated and indoctrinated by older people, while they were vulnerable, in the midst of a crisis of adolescence and identity. I have not yet buried my son... I want to go through this stage first, but then I will fight so that it does not happen again”, assures the woman of Haitian origin.
In the meantime, Yolande wants to restore a form of dignity to the person she gave birth to barely 16 years ago, and whom she never imagined having to carry on the ground. Broken, she assures that she could not see the body of her son until five days after the accident, without further explanation. “He was a very loved, generous little kid who had the gift of making everyone smile. He was very athletic, he liked basketball and boxing. That's what he was, my son,” she recalls in a breath.
With one sister, one half-brother, and two half-sisters, Jason was surrounded by love. He also had numerous friends, including Mehdi, whom he had only known for a few months according to the family, but with whom he shared his last moments.
Family and friends will say a final goodbye to Jason during an intimate funeral this Friday, April 12 in Montreal. On Monday, a funeral prayer was organized at the mosque in the Badr Center for Mehdi.
Helpless friends
In front of the high school that Mehdi attended, his name is on everyone's lips. Among the students who don't dare to speak, or who simply don't know what to say, there is Lina (assumed name), who knew the missing person since childhood. “I've known him since 2014, we were around five when we became friends. He is not a criminal, he did not do it for fun,” assures the teenager.
The 14-year-old student lived on the same street as Mehdi. “He was a really nice boy. He was a good son and a great big brother,” she continues. He was still taking care of his mother, who is disabled. He helped her with the errands. He was very protective of his younger siblings,” she says to illustrate her point.
At the start of the school year, however, Lina noticed a change in the behavior of her lifelong friend, without ever imagining that he would find himself at the heart of such a tragedy. “Mehdi was very intelligent, but at that age, everyone knows that you can easily be influenced. He started to change when he started hanging out with the wrong people,” she said. This is also what other students who knew Mehdi in class noticed. “He changed profoundly, he no longer came to class and was behaving violently at school,” adds Lina.
Young people are aware of the growing influence of certain groups, even within the walls of their schools. Some believe that Mehdi and Jason were abandoned by the institutions and that personalized support could have prevented them from ending up “in the wrong place, at the wrong time.”
Contacted by La Converse, Antoine-de-Saint-Exupéry High School, where Mehdi attended, did not want to answer our questions. “In collaboration with the Montreal Police Department, various awareness-raising activities take place during the school year. The school team can count on several stakeholders who are on the lookout for the difficulties young people are experiencing and trained to support them,” however, assures the Pointe-de-l'Île School Services Center.
Young influencers identified by criminal networks
There are more and more young people who find themselves in a situation similar to that of Mehdi and Jason. From 2015 to 2020, there was a 26% increase in incidents recorded by the police involving firearms in Montreal, according to figures from the Quebec Ministry of Public Security. “Indeed, 56% of perpetrators of armed violence and 38% of victims were between 13 and 25 years old. If we consider the percentage of this age group among the population of the metropolitan region (12%), young people are 4.7 times more likely to be among the perpetrators of armed violence and 3.4 times more likely to be among the victims,” underlines a report published in July 2023 by the International Center for the Prevention of Crime.
This observation is widely shared by community actors in the neighborhoods most affected by this phenomenon. Walner Villedrouin, a DOD Basketball contributor, had been following Jason for three years. “The day of the accident, I had an appointment with him for his community work. I didn't understand why he wasn't there, it was only the next day that I knew... I don't know what exactly he did, but he committed a delinquent act in the past, and that's why he had to do community work. It is a way of involving them to make amends for their actions, but also to create a relationship of trust that allows us to help them get out of the trap,” he confides.
For Jason, unfortunately, it was already too late... The speaker regrets the death of an “intelligent child, with values, who often came to the library to discuss and even tended to reason with those who were tempted to do stupid things”.
For the past year, Walner Villedrouin has noticed the presence of older men prowling around young people in the neighborhood. According to him, criminal networks have identified the influencability of adolescents who lack recognition and are attracted to easy money. But the very real lack of resources in the community environment does not make it possible to ensure daily surveillance.
A quest for identity
Another challenge in understanding the worrying increase in cases of gun violence involving young people: the intercultural conflict that some, with an immigration background, experience more or less well. Hocine Iratni, a social worker for young offenders in a situation of delinquency at the CIUSSS du Centre-Sud-de-l'Île-Montréal, has more than 15 years of experience. “There are a lot of important factors, but what we observe most among young offenders with an immigration background is that they are experiencing two ruptures. One cultural, the other generational,” he analyzes.
Jason was originally from Haiti, and Mehdi from Algeria. The latter arrived in Montreal at the age of four, so he only knew Quebec. “When you are part of a host society, it is easier not to feel included. This feeling of exclusion, on the one hand at the social level and on the other hand when dealing with parents who have lived elsewhere, creates a void for some teens. To fill this void, they seek at all costs to connect and belong to a group”, underlines Hocine Iratni.
This quest for belonging also comes up against the generational gap with their progenitors. In addition, there are several other important factors, such as the temptation of easy money or distrust of society and institutions such as the police and the media, according to the speaker. “Parents were born and raised in a completely different world. They came here and had to adapt. Their children were born here. They did not have to adapt, but they grew up in a reality different from the one their parents knew,” he continues.
When a teenager experiences a crisis, and when their behavior and relationships change, parents don't always take the right approach. Especially since they are generally far from imagining that the worst could happen to their children.
“We often tend to take the problem away from us, to tell ourselves that it only happens to others,” concludes Hocine Iratni. You have to stop thinking like that. When you're in denial, you can't go get help. You have to accept reality and be equipped to prevent this type of situation.”
The community sector calls for political action
On Tuesday, April 9, ten days after the tragedy, Beverley Jacques, the director of DOD Basketball and co-founder of the Coalition Pozé, an organization that fights against the marginalization of young people, organized a press conference in Saint-Léonard.
“The workers are tired, they need help. We don't want the deaths of these young people to remain in vain. They made bad choices, that's undeniable, but aren't they also victims? When that happens in the black community, it feels like it's normal, trivial. We have to get out of these prejudices,” says Mr. Jacques, who was cited by the CBC as one of the black actors of change in Quebec in 2023.
Anyone who knows Jason's family, and has long sought to have him play in his club, denounces a lack of resources and political will to deal with the scourge of armed crime. “We've been raising the alarm for a long time. There is the impression that public decision makers are not affected, because it is not happening at home. Even today, we have two young people who died and who had access to firearms instead of having a ball in their hands. We have parents who suffer... What are we waiting for to move? ” asks Beverley Jacques.
Lina Raffoul, director of the Horizon Carrière Center and the Center Jeunesse Emploi (CJE) in Saint-Léonard, draws the same observation: “We have a community of mobilized organizations that work together, but that lack resources. The children of Saint-Léonard are good kids, but a small part of them are chased by crime, while there is no structure to help families whose adolescents are in crisis.”
Ready to have “uncomfortable but necessary discussions”, community organizations implore the public authorities to focus more on prevention rather than repression, and to give them the means to carry out structural action instead of financing isolated projects. The objective is to protect young people from criminal networks that increase the number of attempts to seduce them. A major challenge that they say they are ready to take on.
“The police have every interest in (re) gaining the trust of young people”
Several courses of action to be taken already exist. For example, the Institut Universitaire des Jeunes en Trouble du CIUSSS du Centre-Sud-de-l'Île Montréal coordinates the PIVOT pilot project (Preventing and intervening on violence observed on the territory), as part of the Quebec strategy to combat armed violence of the Quebec government, called CENTAURE. Still in the pilot phase, it was launched in September 2023 and has a budget of $1.8 million over three years. It is located in only two districts of Montreal: Rivière-des-Prairies—Pointe-aux-Trembles and Montréal-Nord.
A community worker and researcher at the Institut Universitaire des Jeunes en Trouble, René-André Brisebois is participating in the PIVOT pilot project. “To prevent the situation from getting worse, you have to deal with the problem at its root. One of our goals is to find ways to stop or slow the impact of gun violence on young people. This includes offering reintegration opportunities when some people isolate themselves,” says one who sees armed violence as a symptom of a deeper illness.
Several PIVOT agents are thus deployed to certain schools and institutions to offer adapted support to young people who are more at risk of committing an act of violence. The aim is to show them that another path is possible by creating a relationship of trust, rather than opting for systematic repression.
Recognizing the distrust that exists in the police, René-André Brisebois believes that “the police have every interest in gaining or regaining the trust of the community, since the safety of all would be more easily achieved. Police intervention should be the last resort when dealing with a young person in difficulty.”
He hopes that the results will be visible quickly. “PIVOT is based on results and not only wishes. What worked elsewhere was when the police department worked With its partners. Community policing, community policing, creates stronger relationships and trust between communities and the police — and therefore between young people and the police,” said Mr. Brisebois.
For example, in the United States and Scotland, two countries that have adopted this strategy on a large scale, research indicates a 33% to 50% decrease in violent crime. A light at the end of the tunnel?