The secret life of Brian O'Carroll

  Brian O'Carroll was famous in Montreal -- and indeed throughout North America -- for a brief spell following his famous altercation with a police officer Jacques Parent in a Provi-Soir convenience store on January 5, 1985.
  The video was an electrifying watch, a must-see and unforgettable early moment in video surveillance.
  The event: O'Carroll, 53,  asks a police officer Jacques Parent for his badge number after seeing him illegally double park the cruiser outside a Provi-Soir corner store at 952 Decarie St in Saint Laurent.
    The officer loses his temper and holds O'Carroll down against the counter for eight and a half minutes and then arrests him, along with fellow officers Pierre Riberdy and Robert St. Pierre.

   After the altercation O'Carroll returned to the store to ask cashier Joanne Martel, 23, to testfiy for him. 

   She agreed and told him about the videotape. Martel, who no longer worked at the store after a while, told cops nothing.

   One year after the incident, the local news played the tape on January 9, 1986. 

  
   The store's surveillance tape caught all of the action and it became the first incident of police being embarassed on tape. 

   Back then making a complaint against a police officer was not easy, as in 1984 police received 618 complaints against offices but only 164 of them were deemed to warrant investigation. 

  Interestingly 57% were filed by the public with the rest coming from superior offiecs. 

   The day after the tape played on local news, police brass suspended Parent, 40, a 19-year police veteran indefinitely without pay from his $36,000 a year job.
   O'Carroll laid a $97,000 suit against the police.
  Parent's lawyer rounded up people to speak ill of O'Carroll. Cop Yvon Rene explained that he gave him two tickets one for double parking and one for refusing to obey police. O'Carroll filed a complaint following that ticket in 1982.

  Police later did their best to find witnesses to criticize and undermine O'Carroll's reputation. 

   A manager and janitor of an an apartment building O'Carroll lived in both described him as an undesirable tenant. 

 Agas station attendant told the court that O'Carroll tried to get him to pay for his clothing after he himself accidentally splashed gasoline over himself and O'Carroll also demanded that the same man compensate him for scratches to his car after in the car wash.  
    O'Carroll was acquitted on January 22, 1986. Parent was acquitted of criminal charges as well.
   But even a year after complained that he still couldn't get the police report from the event.
   O'Carroll won $32,415 in an out of court settlement in 1991.
    He died a few years later.
   What's less known about the case is that O'Carroll was already known to police for his habit of walking around naked in public.
   Streaking, as it was known, was more common back then.
   It's not clear why O'Carroll had this habit, whether it was sexual or some other impulse which brought him to walk around with his epidermis fully exposed for all to see.
   Cops had cited him for doing this in St. Laurent prior to the conflict.
   He died by leaping from a high rise building. I'm told that he might have been naked at the time but I cannot confirm his final clothing situation with any certainty.
   None of this changes what happened at the depanneur, a video which hopefully advanced police awareness of how to stay calm in the presence of an excited individual. 
    So that was the first time videotape was used against cops in the Montreal area. The first time videotape was used as evidence against criminals around Montreal was on April 3, 1963 when Grant Fraser, 35 and Clifford Wilkonson, 33, were caught robbing $1,000 from a CIBC bank at 559 Rang Notre Dame in St. Chrysostome, southwest of Montreal. Cops later caught the duo robbing a bank in LaSalle and the duo confessed to six robberies, with some help from the videotape.