Sûreté du Québec officer guilty of manslaughter in teen's shooting death
A Sûreté du Québec officer has been found guilty of manslaughter by Court of Quebec judge Joëlle Roy in connection with a fatal shooting of a teenager.
Éric Deslauriers appeared in the Saint-Jérôme courthouse Friday and is facing a minimum of four years in prison and a maximum of 14. His lawyer is set to file a motion to contest this.
His sentence will be announced in the coming months.
The victim was 17-year-old David-Hughes Lacour, who was suspected of having stolen a car on Jan. 22, 2014 in Sainte-Adèle, about an hour northwest of Montreal.
Police were responding to a call about the stolen vehicle.
A car chase followed and ended near a high school, where Lacour was shot twice by Deslauriers and later died in hospital.
However, Deslauriers claimed Lacour was speeding toward him in the car so he fired at the teenager to protect himself.
But a video filmed by a witness in the high school's parking lot led the judge to question this version of the facts, and decide that Deslauriers had used disproportionate force.
In her ruling, Roy found that the SQ officer's life was not in danger and so his actions were not made in self-defense.
She added that Deslauriers was not in the car's path, and that if he felt his life was threatened, he would have been able to move to safety.
