OFFICER DOWN TRIAL: Neighbour recalls the OPP wellness check turned deadly

Alain Bellefeuille arrives at the L’Orignal courthouse on the morning of Friday, March 28, 2025. Bellefeuille is on trial for first-degree murder in the May 2023 shooting death of Ontario Provincial Police Sgt. Eric Mueller. Photo by Tony Caldwell /PostmediaArticle content

Minutes after his wife called 911 for a check on their nextdoor neighbour, André Cousineau was left in shock after the horrifying scenes of a police wellness call turned deadly.

It was May 11, 2023, and Cousineau’s wife, Lina, called 911 saying she thought she heard a gunshot and their neighbour, Alain Bellefeuille, may have shot himself at his home in Bourget, around 50 km east of Ottawa.

Through the laundry room window, which was half-open, André Cousineau, saw three responding officers approach his neighbour’s front door around 2:30 a.m.

He saw the police flashlights inside the darkened house, then heard gunfire. He saw one officer take cover behind a cruiser and later run away from the scene.

Then, he saw OPP Const. Marc Lauzon coming out of the house, and down the front porch steps only to collapse in the yard.

“I could tell he was in pain, in his voice … moaning.”

Cousineau recalled these scenes in his testimony at the first-degree murder trial of Alain Bellefeuille. Bellefeuille is on trial in L’Orignal for the deadly events on the morning of May 11, 2023, in normally quiet Bourget.

That he killed Sgt. Eric Mueller and shot constables Marc Lauzon and François Gamache-Asselin is not in question, nor contested.

The police theory of an ambush that had Bellefeuille lying in wait has been adopted by prosecutors who presented it to the jury.

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OPP Sgt. Eric Mueller died after being shot in Bourget in the early-morning hours of May 11. Photo by Ontario Provincial Police /HandoutArticle content

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But Bellefeuille says it was anything but an ambush. One of his lawyers, Leo Russomanno, has told the jury his client thought it was a home invasion, never called police to lure them to his home, and didn’t know the shadowy figures with flashlights and a gun were police when they came through his unlocked front door at 2:30 a.m. Bellefeuille was sleeping after a day of prepping a drywall job and a night of listening to music over drinks, the jury heard.

OPP Const. Marc Lauzon was the first to enter the house on the wellness check. He had his service pistol drawn.

Mueller, 42, was the second officer to enter the home. His gun never left its holster. Both Mueller and Lauzon were gunned down within seconds of entering the rural home at 2:33 a.m. on May 11, 2023. These haunting scenes are captured on Mueller’s body camera.

As Mueller is bleeding out on the mud room floor, his killer leans over him and says: “You f—ed with the wrong motherf—er, should never have broken into my house.”

Then Bellefeuille says sorry.

They may have been the last words heard by Mueller.

In the bodycam video, Bellefeuille is bearded, with long hair and a ballcap.

In the prisoner’s dock on Tuesday, he looked clean-cut with a dress shirt and sat up straight when his neighbour testified about the events of May 11, 2023.

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Alain Bellefeuille, pictured above on a fishing trip, is on trial for first-degree murder in the May 2023 shooting death of Ontario Provincial Police Sgt. Eric Mueller. Photo by Handout /HandoutArticle content

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Cousineau said that he had turned in for the night with his wife when, hours later, he was woken up. His wife was standing beside the bed looking out the window.

She said she thought she heard a gunshot and feared the worst for their neighbour. She called 911, her husband told the jury.

Then, together, they watched the awful events.

“We were in shock. Stepped away from the window and went down in the basement,” Cousineau testified.

“I was in shock,” he recalled.

But they went back upstairs, saying, “curiosity got the best of us.”

The neighbour told the jury he saw Bellefeuille on the deck, firing at the cruisers as one officer took cover before running away.

Mueller’s bodycam audio also captures the conversation between Bellefeuille and paramedics, who were on standby down the road, waiting for the scene to be safe before going in to help. No police, except the dying Mueller, were in the house.

Bellefeuille had disarmed himself and didn’t leave the scene. He invited paramedics into his home, “Officer down, officer’s down right here.” He told them to hurry and repeated, “come in, come in, he’s breathing still, he’s still breathing.”

The paramedics rushed out Mueller and performed CPR on the way to the hospital, where the father and husband was pronounced dead.

The neighbour couldn’t recall any police sirens or “red and blue lights,” but he did remember seeing a police spotlight and a brief honk-honk that sounded like a horn.

Bellefeuille will take the stand in his own defence after the Crown rests its case.

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