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Mohamed Salah Belhaj’s brother struggles to understand how a person determined to be a “significant risk” to public safety was a free man.
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Paul Cherry • Montreal Gazette Mohsen Belhaj is the brother of Mohamed Salah Belhaj, the second victim in a series of suspected murders in Montreal and Laval this week. Photo by Allen McInnis /Montreal Gazette
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Before leaving for work late Tuesday night, Mohamed Salah Belhaj kissed his two young sons goodnight and decided he didn’t feel like driving his car to work.
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The 48-year-old father chose to take the bus, a decision that would put him in the path of a complete stranger who, the police suspect, wanted to kill for no apparent reason.
That fateful decision made Belhaj one of three men gunned down in Montreal and Laval this week. The suspect in the three homicides, 26-year-old Abdulla Shaikh, was shot and killed Thursday morning at a motel in the St-Laurent district as a Montreal police SWAT team tried to arrest him.
Shaikh died keeping the possible explanations behind why he killed Belhaj and two other victims — André Lemieux, 64, and Alexis Lévis-Crevier, 22 — to himself. The Sûreté du Québec has said it believes Shaikh chose his victims at random.
Lévis-Crevier, who had just started working in construction, was shot and killed in Laval on Wednesday night.
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Lemieux, the father of professional boxer David Lemieux, was killed near his apartment on Blvd Jules-Poitras. in St-Laurent an hour before Belhaj was shot.
A man suspected of killing three people is shot by police in Montreal on August 4, 2022. Photo by Allen McInnis/Montreal Gazette
“I was in the wrong place at the wrong time,” Mohsen Belhaj, Mohamed Salah’s brother, told the Montreal Gazette on Friday as he continued to struggle with the choice of whether his brother should be buried in Montreal, to be near of his widow and children, or Tunisia, his place of birth and where his mother lives. She said her brother’s children, aged six and four, have only been told so far that their father traveled to Tunisia and will return.
His brother was killed while both men mourned the loss of their father, who died on July 29.
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Belhaj said he and his sister-in-law have since been able to piece together some of their brother’s last moments before he was shot Tuesday night.
“Around a quarter to 11 (pm), he took his lunch box and kissed his children. He told them it was too late for them to wake up. They went to bed and he went to work,” Belhaj said. “I was ready to take his car, but he decided, ‘You know what? I don’t feel like taking the car. I’m just going to take the ‘bus. It will be much easier for me. I don’t feel like driving.’
Minutes after leaving his home in the Ahuntsic-Cartierville district, Belhaj was shot at an intersection near St-Benoit Park around 10:50 p.m. He never made it to his job at the Albert Prevost Hospital, an institution that treats patients with mental illness. health problems.
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Belhaj said her brother was part of the general staff at the hospital and was well-liked by his co-workers.
“The guy was a simple man. He worked for his children. He didn’t have any problems. Everyone is in shock. All the medical staff that worked with him, they came to see me (on Thursday) and they all said that Salah he was one of the nicest guys on the staff. They asked, ‘How could this happen to him?’ Belhaj said.
Shaikh had been diagnosed with schizophrenia and was charged with mischief after a series of strange incidents at Trudeau and Mirabel airports over several days in July 2018.
He was found not criminally responsible for his actions and was ordered to live with his parents while he received treatment. But months later, his family became so concerned about Shaikh’s behavior that they asked to have him committed to an institution for people with mental health problems.
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He was released in early January 2021 and the Commission d’examen des troubles mentaux, an administrative tribunal, reviewed his decision on March 29 this year. A psychiatrist told the court that Shaikh “still poses a significant risk to public safety due to his mental state”. But the psychiatrist also recommended that Shaikh could live outside the hospital as long as he continued to follow the conditions imposed on him in January 2021.
On Friday, Belhaj said he is struggling to understand how a man who posed a “significant risk to public safety” could also be a free man.
“That’s the problem with this city. People who do whatever to innocent people, whatever the story, they’re put back on the street. He was mentally challenged and the case was closed,” Belhaj said. “The government, or its institutions, knew he was a risk. They knew the guy had a serious problem. Why didn’t we put him under some kind of control so we knew what he was doing?
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“I mean, he was mentally ill and he was among us. I’m not just speaking for my brother. Of course, it could have happened to any of us. It could happen to you, going to work and being picked on like that. I understand his right to live (as a free person), but if he was a risk to our safety, we can do things much better than we are doing now as a society.As a father of three children, do you think I feel safe sending one of them looking for milk?
Belhaj also said he feels sympathy for Shaikh’s family.
“Behind him is a father and a mother,” he said. “They also lost a son.”
pcherry@postmedia.com
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