The ill-fated Menard brothers and their brief-triumph over parking tickets

   If you want to know the heartbreak that parking tickets can bring, just go down to 303 Notre Dame E and chat with anybody randomly sitting around. You'll get an earful of sad tales about parking tickets that started piling up and left a world of hurt. Last year I talked at length to a single mother who can't get to work without a car but can't afford to pay her $2,000 in tickets.   

    The legend of the Menard brothers suggests that threatening self-harm might wipe the tickets out.        So who were the Menard brothers? Back when they were gunned down in 2000, Charles Edward Menard, 45, Daniel Menard, 46, were LaSalle-based career criminals who knew the city. 

   Heck these guys would pull heists in Delson, the East End, on Jean Talon E., they knew their maps well. But that served them little on that fateful evening on Wednesday January 26, 2000 when they were gunned inside an IGA on Hochelaga near Honore Beaugrand.                             

   The brothers were fleeing a gunman. As a desperate quest for refuge they dashed into a grocery store in hopes that their would-be assassin would not follow. But the shooter was not shy to stride through those glass sliding doors. They fell in a hail of bullets and their bodies thumped to the ground near a pile of bags of salt.  Their killer was never apprehended.   

  These guys had long records as wayward scofflaws. The brothers had been arrested a decade before- with a third brother Richard - while hiding in the ventilation system of a shopping centre in Delson which they were casing for a robbery. Richard, by the way, is still alive. 

  At the time of his fatal shooting Charles was out on bail waiting for to be tried for armed robbery along with Normand Evrard, 41, another inveterate armed robber. 

Brother Richard

   So about the tickets: One of the Menard brothers was - according to legend - ready to leap off a rooftop one day because he wanted to end his days. Police came and he said he'd only come down from the ledge if all of his parking tickets were wiped out. And indeed he was granted his wish, He came down safe and sound and had no more tickets to pay. The yarn- if true - would have happened quite some time ago, like in the 1980s, so don't try that at home kids.