By Ruby Pratka
Local Journalism Initiative
A coroner is calling for better coordination between the Sûreté du Québec and local ambulance services following an investigation into the death of a woman in Stukely-Sud in 2022.
Jocelyne Lessard, 66, lived in Longueuil but had a secondary residence in Stukely-Sud. Shortly after 5:30 p.m. on June 12, 2022, she called 911 to report that an unknown man had broken into her chalet and was chasing her. “While the dispatcher is asking Ms. Lessard various questions, a man demands the car keys,” the report prepared by coroner Kathleen Gélinas goes on. “Ms. Lessard is shouting in pain and no longer responding to the 911 dispatcher’s questions.”
“Without interrupting the call, the dispatcher contacts the Sûreté du Québec. When a man starts speaking to the dispatcher in place of Ms. Lessard, the [911] dispatcher connects him to the Sûreté du Québec dispatcher.”
The call is transferred again, from the main Sûreté du Québec (SQ) dispatch centre to the SQ call centre for the MRC Memphremagog. About 40 minutes after the initial call, an SQ supervisor arrives at the cabin; the supervisor and their colleague search the house and Lessard’s car, which is parked nearby, and find no one. They respond to an apparently unrelated call which turns out to have been made from Lessard’s phone. The officers locate the phone and find Lessard nearby, unresponsive. She was pronounced dead later that evening. According to the coroner’s report, she died due to blunt force trauma to the head.
Three weeks after her death, Jean-Philippe Coutu, a Waterloo man with documented mental health problems, who had been pulled over by the SQ earlier that day for a suspected traffic violation and “made incoherent statements,” was charged with second-degree murder; he was later found not criminally responsible. The Bureau des enquêtes indépendantes, the provincial body charged with investigating suspected police misconduct, also investigated, but found no wrongdoing on the part of the SQ officers.
A coroner’s report can only be released once all other investigations surrounding a death are complete, hence the release of Gelinas’ report nearly three years after Lessard’s murder. Coroners can rule on the cause of a person’s death, but cannot assign blame to any one person or institution. However, they can and do make recommendations aimed at avoiding similar tragedies.
In this case, Gélinas recommended that the SQ work with the regional 911 call centre, the Centre d’appels d’urgence de Chaudière-Appalaches (CAUCA), to “review as soon as possible the transfer procedures for a 911 call containing sensitive information taken during the initial call” and “review protocols which link primary 911 call centres to police emergency call centres to allow for a second call to communicate sensitive information, particularly when the speaker changes in a context of presumed violence.” She noted that the 911 dispatcher could have acted to alert police dispatchers that they were not talking to the initial caller. “I recommend that call transfer protocols be reviewed [to account for] cases where the speaker changes, in a context of presumed violence.” She noted that the implantation of long-awaited “next-generation 911” technology, slated for 2027, allowing callers to send text messages, photos and videos to a dispatcher and first responders to access more precise location information, would make emergency services more accessible and help first responders. “However, we can anticipate that situations involving a change of speaker could still happen.”
The Sûreté du Québec did not respond to a request for comment from the BCN by press time.