Kanesatake Man Stable After Shooting

A Kanesatake man is in stable condition after he was shot twice in the entrance of his home late Friday.

Sources say Normand Théoret sustained bullet wounds to his neck and torso, with fragments possibly lodged in his lung, according to two sources close to investigators. The gunman shot Théoret at his home around 10:30 p.m. and remains at large.

The victim, a father of three, was placed in a car and driven along Rang. Ste Philomène before being intercepted by an ambulance just outside of Kanesatake. They rushed him to a nearby hospital, where he was operated on and remains in the intensive care unit.

Investigators from the Sûreté du Québec are treating the attack as an attempted murder, according to Sgt. Audrey Anne Bilodeau.

“For hours after the incident, all available police in the area were deployed to search for the suspect’s car but we haven’t turned up anything yet,” said Sgt. Bilodeau, a spokesperson for the department. “We don’t yet have a description of the car for media but I can say our ballistics team and investigators from the major crimes unit are on the scene.”

This was the third attack on Théoret’s property in 13 months and the second shooting of a player inside Kanesatake’s cannabis industry. Théoret’s cannabis shop, the Sweetgrass Lodge, was rammed with a stolen car and riddled with bullets in November of last year. Witnesses at the time described an exchange of gunfire between the assailant and someone acting as security outside the shop.

Then, in August, his dispensary was burned to the ground. Later that month, two people were gunned down in a pool hall on Oka Rd. in Deux Montagnes. Sources say one of the victims was connected to the cannabis trade in  Kanien’kehá:ka (Mohawk) territory.

“It’s scary, a home invasion, another shooting, this is lawlessness,” said a Mohawk source close to the investigation. “We can’t have our kids living in a community where home invasions and shootings are just a fact of life.”

There have been over a dozen arsons connected to the cannabis trade since the summer of 2024, according to police sources. Three years ago, during a party at the Green Room dispensary, Montreal gang leader Arsène Mompoint was shot to death by a masked man who fled the scene in a stolen car.

No suspects in any of these attacks have been arrested. Kanesatake, which used to have its own police force, is patrolled by a Sûreté du Québec detachment in neighbouring Oka. A small, unarmed security team patrols the territory and resolves conflicts and while their presence has often helped cool things down, they say they’re underfunded and understaffed.

Théoret is one of the men at the centre of an illegal dumping scheme, uncovered by The Rover, that landed over a dozen Kanesatake residents in court as recently as two months ago. He allegedly accepted thousands of truckloads of contaminated soil from construction sites across the Montreal area onto his property by the Lake of Two Mountains.

In testimony before the court, experts for the Crown say soil samples taken from Théoret’s lakefront property were contaminated. Théoret claims he accepted free fill across his property so he could build homes for his three children, according to a report by The Eastern Door.

This story will be updated.