Joey Casella is reliving a moment he won’t soon forget.
The Laval resident was driving on Highway 440 on Tuesday afternoon when suddenly two police cruisers cut in front of him and forced him to stop.
“My first reaction was, I thought they were, you know, they got the wrong guy. What’s going on here?” he told Global News.
READ MORE: Armed man arrested after police operation shuts down Highway 440 in Laval
Soon after — dozens of police cruisers passed him.
That’s when Casella realized this wasn’t an ordinary police operation.
“I saw at least maybe 30 cop cars zoom by and even at one point — the cop car next me — they literally popped open the trunk,” he said. “They pulled out a shotgun. They jumped inside the car.”
“That’s when everything looked like an action movie.”
A man on the des Laurentides Boulevard overpass was holding a firearm.
Two shots from the gunman were fired in the direction of the police, but fortunately no one was injured. Officers eventually convinced the man to drop the weapon and surrender.
“Every driver was secured to a further location to be in perfect security for them,” Evelyne Boudreau, a Laval police spokesperson said Tuesday night.
Boudreau identified the alleged shooter as 21 year-old Louis Bouillon.
Bouillon was charged Wednesday afternoon with several charges including twice discharging a firearm in public and putting the lives of others in danger, said Boudreau.
Several people were ordered out of their cars during Tuesday’s standoff on the highway and they were strategically placed behind several tractor trailers for protection.
Enrica Uva was asked to shelter three pregnant women and a threeweek-old baby in her Mini Cooper.
“They had three pregnant women come into my car so they could be comfortable with air conditioning so they wouldn’t have to stand in the heat behind the trailer because we didn’t know at that point how long the stand-off was going to be,” Uva told Global News.
Both Uva and Casella say the people around them remained calm and they think the police handled the situation very well.