Gunfire Outside a Laval Strip Mall: 16-Year-Old Wounded in Saint-François, Youth and 35-Year-Old Woman Held for Court (August 13, 2026)

LAVAL — A 16-year-old boy was shot in daylight on Wednesday afternoon near a shopping centre in Laval’s Saint-François district. He is expected to live. By Thursday morning two people were in custody and headed for court: another male youth, and a 35-year-old woman.

The Service de police de Laval says officers were sent to the area of Montée du Moulin and Avenue Marcel-Villeneuve at roughly 3:53 p.m. on August 12 after reports of gunshots. The teenager was taken for medical treatment. Police have said he is expected to recover from his injuries.

Investigators made the two arrests later the same day. Both accused were scheduled to be brought before the court on Thursday, August 13, while the force continues working to establish what led to the shooting. No motive has been made public, and Laval police have not attached the file to any criminal organisation.

An Adult, a Minor, and the Question of Who Was Driving

The detail that separates this file from an ordinary street shooting is the pairing in custody. A male youth and a woman in her mid-thirties is an unusual combination, and it is the sort of pairing that investigators in Quebec have learned to look at closely.

Across Greater Montreal, prosecutors have spent the past several years working through cases in which the person who pulled the trigger was a teenager and the person who arranged the work was not. That division of labour — adults directing, minors executing, on the calculation that a young offender faces a shorter sentence — runs through much of the recent record examined in the Montreal Street Gangs special report.

None of that has been alleged here. Laval police have said only that two people were arrested and that the circumstances are still being determined. Whether the adult in custody is accused of firing, of driving, of supplying, or of something unrelated to the structure of the shooting is exactly what the charge sheet will settle, and the charge sheet was not public at the time of this filing.

Laval Is Not a Quiet Suburb of This File

Saint-François sits at the northeastern edge of Laval, a long way in character from the districts that generate most of the city’s organised-crime headlines. But Laval as a whole has been a working address for serious criminal enterprise for decades, from the Chomedey networks profiled in The Greeks of Chomedey to the biker infrastructure catalogued in the Hells Angels Canada file.

That history is context, not accusation. A 16-year-old shot outside a strip mall on a Wednesday afternoon may turn out to have nothing to do with any of it. The reason the file is worth tracking is that in this region the answer has often gone the other way, and the answer usually arrives at the first court date rather than at the scene.

Standing of This File

This briefing rests on the Laval police account as reported by CityNews Montreal on the morning of August 13, 2026, and corroborated by CTV News Montreal. No charges have been specified publicly and no accused has been named. Both people in custody are presumed innocent unless and until the allegations against them are proven in court. The youth accused is protected by the publication restrictions of the Youth Criminal Justice Act.