It took a 5-death incident to get seat barriers into Mtl police cars

    Montreal police cars are quite sensibly equipped with a barrier between the front and back seats.
    It took a macabre incident which left five dead to get them installed.
    On Saturday October 6, 1984 at 11:15 p.m. Montreal police pulled over to respond to an incident.
    Giovanni Delli Colli, 18, the owner of a souped-up Camaro, flagged down a passing police cruiser at the quiet corner of Dagenais and Monty in Montreal North.
    The police looked in on his roadside grievance. It was the eve of Thanksgiving.
    Delli Colli complained that two men were carjacking his beloved ride
    The carjackers were Dennis Colic, 21, from Woodstock Ontario and Quebecker Jacques Belanger, 19.
    They had both done time and had been recently been paroled for armed robbery.
    Police realized saw fit to detain them.
   

Colic arrested

 The two police officers, Andre Thibodeau and Pierre Beaulieu, placed carjacker Belanger in the front seat.
  They then put the victim of the attempted car theft, Delli Colli, in the backseat.
 Big mistake.
  Delli Colli was still seriously irritated with Belanger for trying to steal his Camaro, so he leaped from the back seat to beat on him. It was possible back then because there was no barrier between the seats.
  The scuffle distracted officer Thibodeau, who was in the process of cuffing Colic.
   In the confusion, Colic disarmed Thibodeau and a wild gunfight ensued, with Colic shooting officer Beaulieu dead with two bullets to the back.
    One of the two bandits then shot and killed Delli Colli with four bullets, as the young man was trying to heroically fight during the gun battle.
    The now-murderous duo of Colic and Belanger had just killed a cop and a young man and were motoring hard out of town.

Two shots of young victim
Giovanni Delli Colli

    They eventually carjacked another car belonging to St. Leonard resident Gilles de Grandpre, 60, and drove him quite some distance. De Grandpre had one hand on the wheel and one on the gun pointed at him at all times. Colic and Belanger eventually released the old timer in a cornfield along the way, ordering him to sing loudly as he walked away (he sang O Canada) so they'd knew he was really walking away.
   Colic and Belanger got back to Woodstock, where they told several others, including female friend Alyda Sinke, about their murderous misdeeds.
   Sinke drove them to an abandoned house where they barricaded themselves inside.
   Police located the two suspects and attempted to get them to surrender
   Belanger started shooting at the cops, hitting officer Jack Ross, but only injuring him slightly. Officer Ross's partner Officer Ron Thompson then shot bandit Belanger dead.
   Soon after, however, other confused officers then shot officer Jack Ross, 56, dead with machine gun fire.

A crowd of onlookers at a home in Woodstock where police staged a 20-hour siege  (Toronto Star)

   Colic, the only surviving bandit, eventually surrendered and in June 1985 Colic went on trial for a whole slew of charges, including murder.
   Amazingly, in spite of witness testimony, as well as that of officer Thibodeau, the jury had a hard time coming to a verdict but he was eventually sentenced to life for the two murders and the other charges were not pursued.
   But Colic would not serve much of his sentence: in June 1986 he hung himself dead in the Ste. Anne des Plaines prison north of Montreal, ending the ghoulish chain, started by a simple roadside arrest that led to a chain of five deaths.
   Subsequent recommendations pointed out that the five-death event that claimed the lives of a carjacking victim, two cops and two bandits, would never have happened had there simply been a barrier in the cop car.