A Nine-Year-Old Woke to Three Hooded Men Beating His Father With a Metal Bar, and the Seventeen-Year-Old Who Was Paid to Do It Got Nothing Because It Was the Wrong Man: Le Soleil Puts the Québec City Contract Economy on the Record (September 9, 2026)

One evening in May, in an apartment in Sainte-Marie in the Beauce, a nine-year-old boy woke to three hooded men kicking in the door and beating his father, who was asleep on the couch beside him. “My child is here,” the man shouted. He kept his arms up to shield the boy, and most of the fractures he ended up with were in those arms. He also lost teeth and was left with multiple facial scars. He was not the man they had come for. The intended target was asleep somewhere else in the same unit.

One of the three was seventeen years old. He had taken the job a few hours earlier on an encrypted messaging application, for $1,200. Because he beat the wrong man, he was paid nothing.

A second minor came along as the “cameraman,” filming the assault at the request of whoever ordered it, for roughly $400. That video was played in a courtroom in August, when the seventeen-year-old admitted the offence. On the recording a panicked child can be seen; his screams filled the hearing room for a long moment. The teenager is being held at a centre jeunesse and will be sentenced this autumn. Nobody in the file can be named — Quebec’s youth criminal justice legislation prohibits identifying accused minors or publishing anything that would identify them.

The Market These Contracts Are Priced In

Le Soleil reporters Judith Desmeules and Victoria Baril set the Sainte-Marie beating inside what they call the guerre des redevances — a royalty or tribute war that they report has hit the greater Québec City region for more than two years. Their framing of the conflict is direct: newer criminal groups continue to make war on the Hells Angels for control of the territory in which narcotics are sold. That is the outlet’s characterisation, not a police statement, and no force has been quoted attaching that label to the Sainte-Marie file.

What the series documents is the labour end of that conflict. Adolescents are recruited on encrypted messaging apps, quoted a price, sent to an address, and made to film the crime in order to be paid. They do not know who hired them. “The young ones have no idea who is at the top of the pyramid. Everybody uses pseudonyms and the kids are at the bottom of the ladder,” Me Anne-Sophie Blouin-Racine, a youth prosecutor with the Directeur des poursuites criminelles et pénales, told the paper.

The requirement to film is the detail worth holding onto. It exists to protect the buyer — proof of delivery before payment — and it is also the single most useful thing that happens to the prosecution. “BBQ contracts, we get a lot of them. Once they are arrested, with their videos, they make our work easier,” said Me Hugo Breton, the other DPCP youth prosecutor interviewed. Contrat BBQ is the street term for an arson job.

The Files Behind the Phrase

Tuesday’s first instalment laid out the cases the prosecutors were describing. In May 2025 two boys, sixteen and seventeen, set a serious fire at a business Le Soleil describes as associated with the Blood Family Mafia, with a man asleep inside. He woke to the smell of smoke and got out before the flames took the building. They had accepted the contract hours earlier on an encrypted app of the Signal type, were paid $2,000 each, and never learned who had ordered it. Québec City police arrested them after two months, on a tip from a convenience-store clerk who had watched the pair filling windshield-washer jugs with gasoline. The video they shot to get paid shows them both hooded inside the business, setting the fire. They pleaded guilty in the Chambre de la jeunesse and were given 150 hours of community service and a year’s probation.

In October 2024 a seventeen-year-old from Lévis went with a nineteen-year-old man to burn a chalet at Saint-Malachie. The Molotov cocktail burned the nineteen-year-old over his entire body. His accomplices left him at the entrance of a Québec City hospital that same night. He survived with injuries that changed his life permanently. The teenager was arrested nearly a year later, in August 2025. He had been promised $10,000; because the pair lost two firearms in the fire, he received $1,000. He pleaded guilty and was given fifteen months of custody.

In March 2026 three Montreal teenagers — seventeen, sixteen and fifteen — abducted a woman from a Québec City pharmacy parking lot in the middle of the afternoon and took her to an Airbnb rented by the person who had commissioned the job. They sent back video of her bound and threatened with a knife, and then understood that they had the wrong person. All three were arrested the same day. Two admitted the facts in April. The oldest was given nine months of custody; the youngest, who had other files before the court, sixteen months.

And in September 2024 at Frampton, a fourteen-year-old from Montreal who had been recruited to burn the Hells Angels’ clubhouse was shot dead by bikers defending the property — a file this site has covered separately. “You can be attacking the Hells Angels’ bunker thinking it is just some chalet like any other,” Blouin-Racine said. “Is your life worth $10,000?”

The Numbers Under the Anecdotes

Across Quebec, the number of minors under supervision after committing an offence has risen 47.2 per cent over the past five years. “That is still significant,” said Geneviève Henry, who heads the youth justice teams at Santé Québec Capitale-Nationale. In the Québec judicial district itself, roughly 750 criminal youth cases have been handled each year since 2023 — a figure the prosecutors describe as similar to pre-pandemic volumes. The caseload has not exploded. What has changed is what is in it.

“Adolescents are appearing in court for more and more serious crimes, it is blatant,” Breton said. “Every week we have adolescents with little or no record who come down from Montreal or somewhere else to commit crimes of significant gravity.” Blouin-Racine put the shift the same way: none of this recruitment existed before, violent crime is up, and the adolescents involved are getting younger. She added a second pattern that runs through nearly every file above — “mistaken identity, that is serious, and we are getting more and more of it.”

Patrick Deroy, a social worker at Santé Québec Capitale-Nationale, described the trend from the other end of the system: “It is really striking, we are going to have more armed violence offences, which is more shocking for the public.” He also described a display behaviour that runs alongside it. Young people acquire weapons and put them on social media. “It is to look hard. It is to act as though I too am connected to a group, when sometimes I am not even connected. But I have the gun on me, so I show it.” Henry described the same thing from the videos: “We see kids filming themselves beating someone, putting someone on their knees.”

Deroy’s closing point was about geography, and it is the reason this file is not only a Québec City story. “There are no more borders between the regions,” he said. “Parents have to be more attentive and be able to educate the child about the risks. Because yes, you can die from it. That is not an exaggeration.”

Where This File Stands

Verified. Every fact above is drawn from the two Le Soleil instalments, both opened and read in full, with their publication timestamps confirmed on the page — September 8, 2026 at 4:03 a.m. (updated 7:20 a.m.) and September 9, 2026 at 4:01 a.m. That covers the Sainte-Marie assault and its court date, the $1,200 and $400 figures, the injuries, the mistaken target, the detention at a centre jeunesse and the autumn sentencing; the May 2025, October 2024, September 2024 and March 2026 files and their outcomes; the 47.2 per cent provincial figure and the roughly 750 annual youth cases in the Québec district; and all quotations from Me Hugo Breton, Me Anne-Sophie Blouin-Racine, Patrick Deroy and Geneviève Henry.

Missing. Everything that a police release or a court file would ordinarily supply and that youth-protection law here withholds: names, precise dates, addresses, occurrence numbers, charge wordings, and the identity of the police force on the Sainte-Marie file. Also missing: who commissioned any of these jobs, whether anyone above the adolescents has been charged in any of them, and whether the person who ordered the Sainte-Marie beating has been identified. The intended target of that beating has not been described.

Not claimed. That any police force has attached the Sainte-Marie assault, the May 2025 arson or the March 2026 abduction to a named organization. The guerre des redevances framing, the description of the burned business as associated with the Blood Family Mafia, and the characterisation of newer groups making war on the Hells Angels for drug territory are all Le Soleil’s reporting, attributed to Le Soleil. No force is quoted using those labels for these files, and no such label is asserted here.

Update trigger. Part three of the series, scheduled for September 10, in which Le Soleil interviews Québec City police on youth intervention. The autumn sentencing of the Sainte-Marie teenager. Any charge laid against the person who commissioned any of these contracts. Any police release identifying an organization behind the recruitment.