Jamal Francique was 28, a Black father of two, when a Peel Regional Police officer fired four times into his car in Mississauga on Jan. 7, 2020. He died in hospital two days later. No one has been charged, and no court has ever heard what happened. On Thursday, a coroner’s jury finally will.
Ontario’s Office of the Chief Coroner has scheduled the inquest to open at 9:30 a.m. on Nov. 12. It is expected to last about 11 days and hear from roughly nine witnesses. Bonnie Goldberg is presiding. It will be held by video conference, and the public can watch live online.
The Special Investigations Unit (SIU), Ontario’s police watchdog, cleared the officer in 2021. It found no reasonable grounds to charge him, concluding the officer believed Francique posed an imminent threat when the car accelerated and struck a police vehicle. According to the SIU’s account, plainclothes officers in unmarked vehicles had planned to surround the car, and one was late getting into position. The officer has not been named in the coverage we reviewed.
The family tells it differently. In a $101 million lawsuit filed in 2022 against Peel police, the Region of Peel’s paramedics and the SIU itself, they allege excessive force, that the officers never identified themselves, and that Francique “posed no threat” and showed no weapon. The suit also claims paramedics waited 20 minutes and then drove him 34 kilometres to a hospital, passing one 2.3 kilometres closer, and that the SIU arrived more than three hours after the shooting. None of this has been tested in court. The Region said it would work with its insurer and lawyers. The SIU said it “stands by the integrity of its investigation.”
A year after the shooting, his father, Derek Francique, said: “The only thing I know is that my son left his home, went to a car that he was helping to get fixed and my son ended up dead.” Derek Francique was later charged with mischief, which he and his lawyer deny.
An inquest is mandatory in Ontario for a death like this one, but it is not a trial. The jury cannot find anyone guilty or liable. It can only hear evidence and make recommendations to prevent similar deaths. That is the limit of what Ontario law offers a family when the watchdog finds no crime: a public airing, and advice that police are free to ignore.
The people at the centre of it are Black Ontarians, and the numbers are not new. The Ontario Human Rights Commission found in 2018 that Black people were 8.8% of Toronto’s population but 70% of those fatally shot by police there. Peel is a different force, but Black residents of Brampton and Mississauga have long said the pattern follows them across the region.
What the jury should press on is what the SIU’s report leaves open: why a late officer turned a planned arrest into a shooting, and what the paramedics did in the 20 minutes before Francique got care. Recommendations that name Peel police and the region, with deadlines for answers, would at least be something his children could hold them to.
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