Car surfing a growing and deadly problem

Video and pictures like this one showing car surfing are appearing more frequently on the Internet.

Andrew Chung

QUEBEC BUREAU

MONTREAL—Tommy Palliser is the only university graduate in his Inuit community of Inukjuak. He’s young, handsome, with a girlfriend of 10 years and two children, a boy and a girl.

Since returning to his home, some 1,500 kilometres north of Montreal and accessible only by plane, armed with his commerce degree from Concordia University, he has helped launch a cultural association that now has a $750,000 budget.

His group has set up a mentorship program, workshops on making kayaks, a first-ever manual for dog sledding. Small-engine repair is coming soon. He’s also working on starting up the local women’s shelter as well as a mini-hydro project to create “badly needed” jobs.

An exemplary Aboriginal success story, it would be, were it not for an incident in the dead of night more than a year ago that brought the foolhardy phenomenon of car surfing to the Canadian fore.

It’s a phenomenon that doesn’t seem to be going away.

On June 29, 2009, Palliser was driving a sport utility vehicle on top of which Kevin Ducharme, his girlfriend’s cousin, was perched. At an intersection in the Montreal island suburb of Dollard-des-Ormeaux, as the light turned green, the 38-year-old Ducharme fell off and hit the pavement. He died later in hospital.

Since then, Palliser, 34, a bright light by all accounts, has seen his life slowly darken. Starting from the emotional pain and family devastation, he has had to endure the charge of dangerous driving causing death.

Eloquent and a keen listener, Palliser had ambitions, he said, to go into politics. But as he punishes himself, those dreams are being snuffed out.

“I don’t think I have much possibility of that anymore,” he says.

It’s not that he couldn’t run for office. It’s just that he wouldn’t want to with a criminal record.

Palliser, still tormented by grief and barely able to speak through the phone, has a court date Aug. 30. He may well be the first person judged in a case of car surfing in Canada.

But there have been others. Just weeks after Ducharme’s death, a 17-year-old girl died of her head injuries in Drummondville. There were two other cases of serious injuries in Quebec last year.

Then, just before midnight last Tuesday in Charlesbourg, near Quebec City, a 40-year-old woman was sitting on top of an SUV. When it started to move, she toppled over. The woman is in critical condition in hospital. Police haven’t been able to interview her, and are not releasing her name. The driver is nowhere to be found.

“She waved to me,” says Denis Coulombe, the only eyewitness, who was returning home to his quiet residential neighbourhood at the time. He pulled into his driveway and when he heard the SUV start to move, he thought, “I hope she’s not still on the roof.”

As a reckless stunt, it’s one of the more risky, says Raynald Marchand, general manager of programs for the Canada Safety Council.

“When you consider that we require that people be belted inside the car,” Marchand says, “standing on the roof of the car while travelling is extremely dangerous.”

Why so many cases in Quebec? Marchand is hard pressed to say why. “Maybe it’s the Latin blood in Quebecers that makes them more likely to take certain risks,” he offers.

But there was a case at his daughter’s school in Ottawa in early June. The surfer lost balance and got pinned under the car. Thankfully, there weren’t serious injuries.

“I think what’s happening is, they’re thrill seekers. Some get addicted to the adrenalin rush. You see these types of stunts on the web, on YouTube, and some people are videotaping these things in order to put them on their web page.”

Quebec’s government seems to have had enough. It’s studying a bill that would lead to more severe penalties for this type of behaviour, including automatic license suspension. Currently police can charge people with offences such as dangerous driving or criminal negligence.

In one of the only medical studies on car surfing, neurosurgeons at Cleveland’s Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine, in 2009 found a steady rise in car surfing fatalities since 2000, with spikes after the release of various Grand Theft Auto video games and MTV’s Jackass series and movies.

“Despite its dangers, car surfing is becoming a more common pastime in the pediatric population,” the authors wrote in the study, published in the Journal of Neurosurgery: Pediatrics.

It probably doesn’t help either when teenage idols, such as 18-year-old Johnny Strange, who garnered headlines for being the youngest to summit the highest mountains on all seven continents, was seen, according to Malibu, California authorities, standing surf-style on top of a BMW in fast-moving traffic last May.

Since car surfing, when it turns bad, so often results in serious injury, the consequences can be grave.

“All the pain and regret we went through as a family,” says Palliser, “it’s just non-stop. Even today I regret that I ever went to my girlfriend’s cousin’s house. It was a big mistake and I just have to live with that.”

Palliser says he never thought he’d ever be part of such an incident, never thought that his friend would crawl through the sunroof.

However, he says he’s willing to do anything to dissuade others from trying it.

“It really hurts me knowing that my accident was the first in Canada, the first in Quebec,” he says quietly. “It’s even harder to think that other people are dumb enough to do this purposely.”

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