Police killed or injured their loved ones. Grief turned these 3 strangers into allies

No ace tells you what to do after witnessing law bunk your 28-year-old boy in an interference that turns fatal, or learning police shot your teenager dead in a parking lot.

There’s also no clear roadmap when a police operation causes severe injuries to your 73-year-old father.

That isolating experience — a mix of grief and utter disbelief — is part of what connected a handful of families from across Quebec, each of them dealing with the physical and emotional toll of having a loved one who was killed or injured by police.

“You never recover,” said Celik, whose son, Koray, died in a police intervention in his home nine years ago. “We are also casualties of the same violence, in a different way.”

This informal group acts as a kind of emotional support network, and one pushing a shared goal: more transparency and integrity on the part of Quebec’s police watchdog.

One common thread for these families is Alexandre Popovic — an advocate connecting them behind the scenes. 

He’s the spokesperson for the Coalition Against Police Repression and Abuse, also known as La CRAP, a group formed in 2008 after the police killing of 18-year-old Fredy Villanueva in Montréal-Nord. 

Popovic says connection is important because families are “facing a big machine.” 

“We're facing the state,” he said. 

The BEI investigates whenever a civilian is seriously injured or killed during a police intervention, but few details are released unless charges are laid by Quebec’s prosecutor’s office, the Directeur des poursuites criminelles et pénales (DPCP). 

Popovic notes families are dealing with lawyers, the BEI, the DPCP, the access to information system and the Quebec coroner — in cases where the person did not survive the police encounter.

“Nobody is really prepared for that,” he said. 

In March, the Celik, Marszalik and Wing families signed a joint letter requesting an administrative inquiry into what they consider to be systemic problems surrounding BEI investigations.

They asked for the inquiry to shed light on a number of issues, including what they call the BEI’s “lack of professionalism,” its bias in favour of police officers and the systemic nature of alleged wrongdoings. 

Since his son’s death, Celik hasn’t stopped advocating for justice and highlighting the gaps of the BEI.

The system is set up “to make sure you're not going to get anywhere,” said Celik. 

In March 2017, Koray’s mom, June, called 911 because their son was in crisis. The 28-year-old had reportedly mixed alcohol with medication he was prescribed for dental pain and was intent on getting behind the wheel.  

The play-by-play is burned into Celik’s mind: Police officers tackling his son; ceramics falling off the shelves and shattering; his son’s face pressed down on the shards. 

He says police "viciously and violently,” beat his son.

“We were screaming for them to stop,” said Celik. 

“We were helpless, we couldn’t stop them,” he said, taking a pause and looking down at the floor.

Celik says the family needed help, but instead, officers — who arrived on scene at the family’s Île–Bizard home off the island of Montreal — used excessive force on their son. 

In 2019, Quebec's prosecution service announced charges would not be laid against the police officers.

But in 2021, the Celik family was awarded $30,000 in damages in a civil suit against the BEI, with a judge saying the agency favoured officers’ version of events in their investigation of Koray’s case.

Not long after his son’s death, Celik met Tracy Wing. 

“We realized that, by talking to each other, obviously, that the issues are common,” he said.

Like him, Wing says she struggled to get justice and even the smallest of answers regarding what happened the night her 17-year-old son — Riley Fairholm — was shot by provincial police in Lac-Brome, Que. 

Wing says she wrongly assumed she was going to receive a lot of information after her son was killed in 2018 in a parking lot in Lac-Brome, Que. 

Thinking back to that day, Wing says she knew something was very wrong that early morning in late July when Fairholm, who was struggling with depression, sent her a text message at 1:42 a.m. Saying “I love you.”

When she first arrived on scene, just minutes after her son's text, she thought he'd hurt himself. It took the police hours to tell her an officer had shot and killed Fairholm, who was holding an air gun at the time, in an intervention that is said to have lasted just over a minute.   

According to a coroner’s report in November 2022, the 911 call from the teen leading to his fatal shooting was the last in a long list of cries for help that weren't handled properly and ultimately contributed to his death. 

“When, you know, your child dies violently like that and traumatically, it’s really hard on the people around me. I’m not the same person as I was,” Wing said. 

“I just started to realize that I was kind of alone in this and there really was not a lot of information that I’d have access to. And I really wanted to know what had happened to my son,” she said, wringing her hands. 

On her left arm, a green bracelet dangled from her wrist, with her son’s name inscribed.

She says meeting Celik helped her not feel so alone in a very isolating process.

Collaborating with other families is what breaks the isolation, says Wing. Living in such a state of grief, she says “sometimes you can feel very gaslit by what you’re reading, and then you start wondering, ‘Is it me?’”

Magda Marszalik nodded her head at that comment. 

She connected with Wing and Celik in 2025 after her 73-year-old father suffered serious injuries, including a heart attack, following a police intervention in the Eastern Townships in 2024. Marszalik was advised by her family’s lawyers not to share more details of the incident, including her father’s name, because it could affect the family’s ongoing legal case against the police force involved. 

After her father was injured, Marszalik, who is speaking out publicly for the first time, says she had to advise the BEI herself about the incident — four months after the intervention. 

“He was psychologically and physically broken and had no resources,” she said.  

“What you have to know is that the experience we went through with the BEI … it was a pretty  concerning experience.”

While the BEI says it has strong values of transparency, impartiality and rigour, Marszalik says they’re not there yet.

In their March letter, the families say they are unable to trust the investigative mechanism. 

They wrote the letter after Quebec's Domestic Security Minister, Ian Lafrenière, said he will be launching an administrative investigation into the Longueuil police department and its director in connection with the death of 15-year-old Nooran Rezayi.

The teen was unarmed and fatally shot within seconds of a police officer arriving at the area where he and a group of youths had been walking in September 2025.

Marszalik, Celik and Wing are requesting a larger administrative inquiry — one that sheds light on the BEI's overall conduct as well.

In an emailed statement, the BEI said it is committed to responding to the public's wishes while balancing its actions to “preserve impartiality and respect for the various legal obligations,” which include the protection of evidence and third-party personal information.

“The BEI does not lose sight of the reason for its creation, and the public can rest assured that this matter — namely, allowing for greater transparency — is among the projects put forward by BEI officials, however, we cannot share any conclusions at this time," read the email.

Not long after Nooran’s death, Lafrenière said he was open to publicly releasing the reports by the province's watchdog. Quebec is the only province whose police oversight body doesn’t make its investigations public. 

But, Lafrenière said, doing so would raise other issues — including how reports would likely be significantly redacted. 

With the BEI about to mark a decade since it began its operations, families argue the agency needs a revamp to ensure transparency, establish trust and, above all, spare other families from the same painful experiences.

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