Eyewitnesses watched as Wetaskiwin RCMP shot man
Wounded man flown to Edmonton with potentially life-threatening injuries
Lorne Conklin woke up at 4 a.m. on Tuesday and saw the red-and-blue pulse of police lights through his blinds.
He went to the patio door, and saw three or four police cars outside. He noticed a man across the street.
“At the end apartment on the lower level … there was a guy coming in and out, two or three separate times, with a bow and arrow. He would come out, go around the corner of the building, go back inside. The police were quite concerned. They had their revolvers drawn.”
Conklin and his wife, Cathy, watched for the next 45 minutes as the tense drama unfolded.
The man with the bow went in and out of a ground-floor apartment.
“They kept yelling at him, put your weapon down,” Cathy Conklin said. “Every time he’d come out and go around the corner, they’d yell, ‘Stop!"
Then they heard, pop, pop, pop.
“We heard the gunshots and I saw him fall,” she said.
The Conklins say they heard three to five shots. Police closed in, asked the man if anyone else was inside the apartment. Then officers got the wounded man to his feet.
“They walked him to the police car,” Cathy Conklin said. “So, he was alive.”
Officers and a police dog went inside the apartment.
An ambulance arrived, the wounded man was loaded aboard and driven to a local hospital. A STARS helicopter was sent to the area just before 6 a.m. A spokesperson said a 40-year-old man with a gunshot wound was flown to Edmonton's University of Alberta hospital, where he remains in stable condition.
Wetaskiwin RCMP said officers went to the apartment building in response to a call about a domestic dispute that came in at about 4 a.m.
The Conklins say they saw the same man outside taking target practice a few months ago.
“We had seen the man, last fall, out practising with the arrow,” Cathy Conklin said. “We kind of wondered then, that’s not very safe in town. But we never reported it. Kind of didn’t want to get too involved.”
Lorne Conklin described what he saw Tuesday morning as a compound hunting bow. It was dark outside, so he couldn’t actually see if the man was carrying arrows as well.
He said he never saw the man point the bow at police.
“He just was carrying it.”
The Alberta Serious Incident Response Team is now investigating. ASIRT investigates all incidents involving Alberta police that result in serious injury or death.