It was a close call last evening for a young Gatineau woman and her 3 year old daughter when their car hit a horse on the road last night. The horse was killed; amazingly, the driver and her daughter escaped with minor injuries.   The bizarre collision happened around 8:30 last night on Maloney Boulevard East in a rural sector of Gatineau.  The horse was one of seven running on the road after escaping from a nearby farm.  Police were responding to that call of horses on the loose when another call came in about one being hit.  In a wrecking yard in east end Gatineau, a 2002 Chev Malibu sits crumpled and broken, clearly no match for a thousand pound animal in full panic mode. The horse flipped on top of the hood and peeled back the roof according to a witness. 

"Let's just say the car had no more roof because the horse went right over,” says Gatineau resident Suzanne Mann.  The horrifying drama unfolded right in front of her house.

Gatineau Police got a call around 8:30 last night about 7 horses on the loose along Maloney Boulevard East. The owners were trying to corral them.

"They ended up going that way,” says Mann, as she points down the road, “then turned around and ended up going that way so they (the owners) were chasing the  horses and one of them got hit right in front of the house.”

The horse died on impact.  The 32-year-old female driver of the car was knocked out.  Her 3 year old daughter was buckled in the back.  Amazingly, both sustained minor injuries.

“We were scared of this happening before,” says the owner of the horses, Chris Perron.

Perron rents land just off Maloney Boulevard.  He retrains horses with temperament problems, then sells them.  Perron says last night; something spooked one of the horses.  It jumped the electrical fence and the other six followed.

"You might as well have the gates you want, if the deer or something comes in the field, they'll spook.  It happens a lot in the horse world,” says Perron.

That's not a good enough explanation for Gatineau Police, though, who are looking at fines under the Municipal bylaw act.

Sergeant Jean-Paul Le May is with Gatineau Police, “The owner of the horses has a responsibility for the enclosure and the gates so we're looking at that to see what happened exactly, why were those horses out of their enclosure.”

“I’m very sad for the horse but sad also for the lady,” says Chris Perron.

He says his family was in the process of moving their horse operation and were out celebrating the plans last night when this happened.