2023-12-04 18:32:12
Two years following his violent arrest at the District Saint-Joseph bar, Mathieu Gamache still has the following-effects and some flash-back. He remembers being beaten and the phrase said following his arrest: “I don’t care regarding your children.”
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The thirty-year-old man was invited to the witness box on Monday, on the first day of the trial of SPVQ police officer Jacob Picard for assault causing injury.
He sees himself once more in the street, lying on what he thought was the hood of the police car.
“With the videos, it wasn’t the hood, but I always remember that. I’m on the car. I don’t understand how I got arrested with handcuffs. No one says anything to me until I say “hug [comment ça] I am arrested, I have children”. And then, I hear “I love your children”. Let’s say it’s coming to get me,” he said.
His memories are vague and the evidence disclosed so far does not establish that this sentence was uttered by the accused.
Head first
The alleged victim then remembers being surrounded by at least two peace officers.
“From there I was getting punches in the legs, punches in the ribs, punches everywhere. […] And following that, they took me by the handcuffs, they lifted them and they threw me on the ground between the patrol car and the sidewalk. I had my face in the water flowing down the street.”
It all started a few minutes earlier, late in the evening, on October 16, 2021. Mr. Gamache then ended the evening in the restaurant-bar on rue Saint-Joseph, with his partner and friends, following attending a concert.
He remembers that police officers entered the bar and one of them approached him while he was dancing to ask him to put on a mask, given the pandemic that was still going on.
Quickly, a “tension”, which he cannot explain, set in, according to him, while he tried to find his mask in his coat.
“Hurt everywhere”
A moment later, he was filmed by a surveillance camera of the establishment in a sequence where we see an agent violently throwing him, head first, once morest a wall, then being handcuffed. These images went around the web following being revealed by The newspaper.
Taken back to his home by two police officers, Mr. Gamache remembers that he had “pain everywhere”, in his ribs, thighs, shoulders, wrists and head. According to him, the police gave him a ticket for “uproar” which was subsequently canceled by the City.
He felt “destroyed” and had blood running down his face. He describes difficult months followingwards, with severe fatigue and panic attacks like he had never had before, he describes. He learned in December that he suffered from a concussion.
Lack of energy, eye fatigue in front of a screen, sudden headaches: even today, he claims not to have regained his full health although his worst symptoms have disappeared thanks to medical follow-up.
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