A Beauharnois man says he's lucky to be alive after someone dropped a rock from an overpass and onto the roof of his car as he was driving on Highway 30 on Tuesday evening.
Michel Saulnier was driving on the eastbound section of the highway in Beauharnois at around 10:40 that evening. As he passed the overpass at Boul. de l'Énergie, he felt something crash on the roof of his car.
"I thought first, it was a jumper [committing] suicide," Saulnier told CJAD 800 News. "Then I thought it was some cement falling from the overpass, but that's not possible, because the 30 was built up three years ago."
Then, not long after he pulled over, he realized someone had thrown a football-sized rock on the roof of his car.
Saulnier called the SQ, who told him they'd been receiving complaints about young people throwing eggs and other debris from overpasses — for fun.
"They told me that for the past three weeks, they've been getting complaints that people were throwing eggs from overpasses," Saulnier says. "They know that some teams [of people] are doing challenges. They start throwing eggs. Then they start throwing little rocks. And I was the lucky one who got hit with a big rock, the size of a football.
"I was pretty lucky that I wasn't killed. If I had the rock had landed on my windshield, I wouldn't be talking to you now. You can call that a miracle."
Police haven't made any arrests in connection with the incident.
Back in April of 1997, a similar incident had deadly consequences. A rock thrown from an overpass above the Ville Marie Expressway near the Palais des Congrès crashed through the windshield of a passing car and killed a 24-year-old Ville Emard woman as she was sitting in the passenger seat.
Other incidents have been reported in the Montreal area since then, prompting some cities and towns to erect barriers to prevent people from tossing things onto the roadway below.
Saulnier says he wants people — especially parents — to understand that those kinds of "games" can be deadly serious.
"This has got to stop. This is ridiculous," he said. "The parents of these teens...if you've got a doubt, please call your local police or the SQ. Someone's going to get killed one of these days."