This house was the location of one of the most explosive deadly events ever in NDG. At 8 am, Sunday October 20, 1963 at 3440 Beaconsfield in NDG, a family that was getting ready to move to New York state was blasted by an explosion in their home. A woman and her two daughters were killed while her son was badly injured and husband injured as well.
That was the same year, of course, as the FLQ bombers started their mad bombing spree, so wrongdoing was on everybody's mind from the start.
Dead were Sheila Haumont, 44, Nicole Haumont, 17, Leslie Haumont, 10.
Roland Haumont, 42, a Frenchman who had served in the French resistance and had been teaching for a year at Harpur College in Binghamton, NY, was injured but not killed by the blast.
His son Marc-Christian Haumont, 13, survived with injuries.
Suspicion turned against Prof Haumont because it quickly came out that he had been seeing a 20-year-old blonde bombshell former-student-now-waitress in Binghamton on the side but they were apparently Splitsville by then according to her court testimony December 10 (see last two grafs).
In other words, the Americans were putting a Frenchman on trial because they didn't understand French romantic tradition of having a mistress.
The first person Haumont phoned after he woke from his coma was his young girlfriend in Binghampton, which led authorities to believe that she might have been the motive being the affair.
They noted that Haumont was also hostile and condescending to them.
That's likely what caused local cops to charge him with murder a couple of weeks after the incident. Haumont's lawyer Jean de Brabant (who is a very interesting story himself) declared that Haumont would be happy to take a lie detector test.
de Brabant tells Coolopolis that Haumont's eagerness to undergo the lie detector test demonstrated his innocence.
The local fire guys believed that Haumont had opened up several propane tanks outside of his house to start the blast. The charges were dismissed a few weeks later for lack of evidence.
Haumont claimed that the blast came from a natural gas leak, not a propane explosion.
After about 10 weeks of examining the evidence, Justice Claude Wagner declared there to be insufficient evidence to prosecute.
Haumont attempted to sue Quebec Natural Gas for the kingly sum of $145,000 and alleged that employees had come in quickly to the scene to remove the broke equipment that led to the disaster. That initiative failed, as the decision was worded in a way that made such a suit difficult.
Haumont went on to work for Expo 67 and then the provincial education department but was fired after writing a book criticizing the education system in Quebec.
He remained open to the media afterwards and was interviewed concerning his difficulties finding work after the events. In 1983 he did an interview complaining that the Canadian government had allowed far too many French Nazi collaborators into the country.
Haumont remarried and eventually died around 1995 according to his son Marc who had a stormy relationship with his sometimes-physically abusive father. "It was like a dream," Marc Haumont, who still lives in NDG, told Coolopolis in 2017.
Lawyer de Brabant notes that his career took off after getting Haumont exonerated, as public opinion had already convicted the innocent man.
"One of the proudest things I ever did was getting him off at the preliminary hearing given that I thought there was a good chance of him getting convicted," said de Brabant.
His son Marc-Christian Haumont, 13, survived with injuries.
Suspicion turned against Prof Haumont because it quickly came out that he had been seeing a 20-year-old blonde bombshell former-student-now-waitress in Binghamton on the side but they were apparently Splitsville by then according to her court testimony December 10 (see last two grafs).
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| Roland Haumont after being declared not guilty |
The first person Haumont phoned after he woke from his coma was his young girlfriend in Binghampton, which led authorities to believe that she might have been the motive being the affair.
They noted that Haumont was also hostile and condescending to them.
That's likely what caused local cops to charge him with murder a couple of weeks after the incident. Haumont's lawyer Jean de Brabant (who is a very interesting story himself) declared that Haumont would be happy to take a lie detector test.
de Brabant tells Coolopolis that Haumont's eagerness to undergo the lie detector test demonstrated his innocence.
The local fire guys believed that Haumont had opened up several propane tanks outside of his house to start the blast. The charges were dismissed a few weeks later for lack of evidence.
Haumont claimed that the blast came from a natural gas leak, not a propane explosion.After about 10 weeks of examining the evidence, Justice Claude Wagner declared there to be insufficient evidence to prosecute.
Haumont attempted to sue Quebec Natural Gas for the kingly sum of $145,000 and alleged that employees had come in quickly to the scene to remove the broke equipment that led to the disaster. That initiative failed, as the decision was worded in a way that made such a suit difficult.
Haumont went on to work for Expo 67 and then the provincial education department but was fired after writing a book criticizing the education system in Quebec.
He remained open to the media afterwards and was interviewed concerning his difficulties finding work after the events. In 1983 he did an interview complaining that the Canadian government had allowed far too many French Nazi collaborators into the country.
Haumont remarried and eventually died around 1995 according to his son Marc who had a stormy relationship with his sometimes-physically abusive father. "It was like a dream," Marc Haumont, who still lives in NDG, told Coolopolis in 2017.
Lawyer de Brabant notes that his career took off after getting Haumont exonerated, as public opinion had already convicted the innocent man.
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| Sheilah Haumont |
I remember going in the car, with my parents, to go see a pile of splintered lumber with smoke coming out, near where we lived.
ReplyDelete“Gas explosion” was the verdict.
Some 10 years later, when they bought an appartment house in Outremont, the first thing they did was get the gas out and install electric stoves for tenants…
I cannot add much more to what Mr. EMDX said, other than it was warm, and on a Saturday or a Sunday, as my Father was home from work.
ReplyDeleteWe too drove over and walked south on B. to view a smoking mess of shattered lumber and other housey stuff just above Sherbrooke.
As I recall, 2 were killed?
There were two other well-known explosions in the west end in the sixties.
One in a large apartment block in LaSalle near the CPR yard that killed over 20 people. Winter 1965?
And the other at Monsanto Chemical on the south side of the Lachine Canal on St. Patrick St. near old La Salle Coke. Fatalities there, also.
One explosion on the west island was where a large gasoline air compressor used for pnuematic drills had it's air reservoir split with a loud bang that was heard for a long distance around.
Many years ago.
Such gas explosions have occured elsewhere in the Montreal area from time to time--often with fatal results.
ReplyDeleteThe most notorious incident occurred on the morning of March 1, 1965 in an apartment block on the corner of Jean Milot and Bergevin in LaSalle Heights where 28 people perished. In fact, I remember hearing the blast where I lived over five miles away.
The investigation eventually found the source of the explosion to have been a cracked 6-inch pipe behind the building. Evidently, gas company inspectors had been negligent in making their required area checks.
Another long-forgotten incident occurred on December 1, 1932 in the north east end of the city centering around St. Denis and Belanger, but also as far north as Gouin Blvd. when the sewer system became infiltrated by fumes due to an apparent service station gasoline tank leak.
Multiple explosions which residents at first believed to be an earthquake resulted, and flames shot 30 feet high into the air from manhole covers which flew like deadly missiles. One building located at what is now the Rosemont Metro and bus station at
the southwest corner of Rosemont Blvd. and St. Vallier collapsed into rubble, burying their residents. Miraculously, nobody was killed!
In 1958, the company that is now called Gaz Metropolitain introduced the sulphur-like smell ingredient mercaptan into their network in order to reduce and presumably even eliminate instances of death by accident and suicide.
No system is completely foolproof, however, and the danger of leaking gas is unfortunately still very much a reality.
I was waiting for the 101 bus (Cote St Luc) at the corner of Cote St Luc and Girouard (where the car wash is now) at about 10 pm when the sky lit up for a moment. It was the Monsanto explosion in Ville LaSalle, visible fromt here.
ReplyDeleteHey, maybe we were at the same bus stop that night. I remember the sky lighting up too from Monsanto.
DeleteJean de Brabant later married a former AC stewardess, Johanne was her name...she headed up Christian Dior's local ops for awhile...in between playing the field with several local luminaries and walking on the Jean-Coutu side of the street with several young (female) models.
ReplyDeleteThe Judge, Claude Wagner, lost out to Robert Bourassa to lead the Quebec Liberals, then got himself elected as the Conservative MP for St-Hyacinthe.
No "p" in Bada-Binghamton. Not part of the Hamptons by any stretch of the imagination.
ReplyDeletePeabody
I recall also about the LaSalle explosion; some said that this gave a lasting bad impression to gas heating, and that made people jittery when it comes to gas — I still am; I will not live in a house with has gas.
ReplyDeleteWho remembers the old ads with the little genie with a flame-hat???
Some years ago, while I walked to the Métro, I noticed that a neighbouring business has had it’s gas regulator neatly knocked-off from the intake manifold; gas was happily pouring out and it was smelling all over the place.
I pulled my cellphone and I waited until I was about 400 feet from the leak to call (those phones **CAN** cause explosions) and dialed 911 only to find blatant cluelessness; those übermorons **NEED** an address; if you give them an intersection, they are totally helpless. So in the end, I told them “never mind, I’m at the fire station right now and I’ll tell the fireguys in person” and hung-up.
When I came back home several hours later, the gas regulator was replaced and the area didn’t reek of cute black kitties with white on top.
Both
ReplyDeletehttp://shiftfocus.ca/ )have a look!)
and
a priest of the Russian Orthodox Sign of the Theotokus Church have resided at this address in recent years.
I lived on Bergervin in Ville LaSalle and remember the incident very well.I was very young but remember the loud blast of the explosion just around 8 AM.It left a big hole in the ground filled with building debris.I remember that the military sent over some sailors to look for bodies .After that ,my father said he would never live again in a building that had natural gas.If I remember correctly the blast was so powerful that the bricks on the building we had lived in came down from one wall.
ReplyDeleteI also remember the explosion on Beaconsfield Ave in NDG, a few years later,my parents had friends who lived on that street who we would visit on weekends.There were stories of it being gas and there were the stories of the owner purposely blowing up the building himself.There was not much of that building left standing either.
My parents had just moved out of 3440 Beaconsfield Ave house and back to England when the explosion happened! My dad said the police called him in the UK to find out if he had left any propane tanks on the property. He assured them that nothing had been left there by us and that the house and the grounds were completely empty when we left. They also heard the rumor that the professor had deliberately blown up the house. It turned out he knew quite a bit about explosives and so positioned himself and his son so that a “mushroom” effect explosion would go up and over them and they’d be okay. I have no idea if this would be at all possible. Maybe just gossip. BTW, if midwifery had been legal, I would have been born in that house!
ReplyDeleteOn the morning of January 20, 1978, I remember riding the bus past 2965 Cote Ste. Catherine Road just east of St. Justine's Hospital to see the remains of a duplex which had exploded the day before. Two elderly residents died in the tragedy.
ReplyDeleteSee the Montreal Gazette for January 21, 1978, page 4: "Gaz truck failed to detect gas leak before fatal explosion".
https://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=Fr8DH2VBP9sC&dat=19780121&printsec=frontpage&hl=en
(Note that the previous January 20th edition of the Gazette erroneously published 3175 as the address).
What is puzzling about this event is Gaz Met's claim that dynamiting on Van Horne Avenue--over a quarter mile to the north--was suspected as the reason for the explosion. I find this claim difficult to believe yet scary if eventually proven true. How far away is safe?
The destroyed duplex was soon replaced by this apartment block:
https://www.google.ca/maps/place/2965+Chemin+de+la+C%C3%B4te-Sainte-Catherine,+Montr%C3%A9al,+QC+H3T+1C3/@45.5044204,-73.6223227,3a,75y,296h,90t/data=!3m7!1e1!3m5!1s0pR92nSH952lXJQRQEKMHQ!2e0!6s%2F%2Fgeo2.ggpht.com%2Fcbk%3Fpanoid%3D0pR92nSH952lXJQRQEKMHQ%26output%3Dthumbnail%26cb_client%3Dsearch.TACTILE.gps%26thumb%3D2%26w%3D203%26h%3D100%26yaw%3D296.87848%26pitch%3D0!7i13312!8i6656!4m2!3m1!1s0x4cc91993315ca4a7:0xec9d5c427efc285c
A few more such tragedies are listed here:
http://www.hermit.cc/pipeline/PNGTS/SAFETY/PSAFEMTL.HTM