Mountie who shot at fire hall had 'no doubt' N.S. gunman was outside
Man who was targeted was in fact local emergency management co-ordinator, not the mass killer
Const. Terry Brown said there was no doubt in his mind a man in a safety vest running behind an RCMP cruiser towards the fire hall in Onslow, N.S., in the midst of the frenzied hunt for a mass shooter was the suspect he'd heard the gunman's spouse describe hours earlier.
The RCMP officer recounted the "split-second" decision he and his partner made before discharging their carbines in the direction of what turned out to be a civilian on April 19, 2020, in a lengthy interview with the public inquiry examining the response to the mass shooting that claimed the lives of 22 people, including a pregnant woman and a Mountie.
"I was sure that he was — if he got away, he was going to go kill more people, because there was no doubt in my mind … that that's the guy we were looking for," Brown told investigators with the Mass Casualty Commission on March 10, 2022, according to new details released by the inquiry on Monday.
Brown said he was not aware the fire hall was being used as a comfort centre for people told to leave their homes in Portapique, N.S., the tiny community 28 kilometres away where 13 people had been murdered the night before. He also told the inquiry he did not know that a fellow Mountie from Pictou County had been sent there to provide security that morning.
The gunman was driving a replica RCMP cruiser and was disguised as a Mountie. Brown said his partner, Const. Dave Melanson, tried to radio colleagues after they slammed on the brakes of their unmarked Nissan Altima less than 100 metres from the fire hall to alert them they saw an RCMP cruiser and who they thought was Gabriel Wortman, the man wanted for murder.
Brown said he didn't even notice a second person at the hall, the actual RCMP officer sitting in his patrol car, and had his carbine pointed at another man in the parking lot who was wearing a vest.
"And he's looking at me and then he ducks behind the car, and I was sure he was getting a gun," Brown told the inquiry. "We're yelling, like, 'Show us your hands.' And this is happening very, very quickly."
He said he started firing when the man started running toward the building and in retrospect, the "tunnel vision" of concentration he experienced meant that he didn't hear his own rifle go off or realize that his partner also fired.
The man wearing the high-visibility yellow and orange safety vest, David Westlake, was the emergency management co-ordinator for Colchester County and was at the fire hall to help connect displaced people with support provided by the Red Cross.
Westlake, who spoke to commission investigators last June, has a different recollection of the same moments, when he said he was walking behind the Pictou County cruiser and a grey vehicle screeched to a halt across the parking lot.
"I never heard 'police' or 'show your hands.' I heard 'get down.' And I am adamant to this day this is what I heard," Westlake said in his interview.
"I remember a shot that sounded like a sonic boom and then another one that was really loud and I'm moving at this time."
Brown fired four rounds and Melanson fired one, inquiry documents show.
Westlake said he ran inside yelling "shots fired," and ducked down as he entered the fire hall to pick up the portable radio he had dropped. It would be hours before he realized he was the Mounties' target.
Const. Dave Gagnon, the officer from Pictou County who was sitting in his parked vehicle, tried to radio back to the officers. He also yelled at them and they finally dropped their guns, he told Nova Scotia's Serious Incident Response Team, the police watchdog agency that investigated the shooting at the fire hall. It found all three officers experienced problems getting on their radios due to getting "bonged out," a problem that results from many people trying to talk at once.
On Monday, the public inquiry heard audio that Gagnon was able to transmit.
"Hey! Hey! Hey! Hey.... Who are you shooting at? It's Gagnon," he said.
4 men hid for an hour
In the hall, two firefighters had been assisting Richard Ellison, a man from Portapique whose son was killed the previous evening.
Greg Muise, the fire chief, and Darrell Currie, the deputy chief, previously told CBC they hid in terror behind tables for an hour after hearing the shots outside their hall, thinking the actual gunman was outside and having heard someone banging on one of the hall's doors.
Muise and Currie told CBC at the beginning of public hearings that the shooting has caused lasting trauma and they remain frustrated that no one from the RCMP has ever apologized or explained why shots were fired.
Muise, Currie and Ellison testified together in a panel on Monday in Halifax and told the inquiry's commissioners they feared for their lives.
"I remember thinking, how am I going to die? Am I going to bleed out on the floor of this comfort centre? Am I going to see this person? Is he going to shoot through the wall? It was pretty horrific," Currie said.
'Is everyone OK?'
Westlake was the only one of the four to speak to a Mountie in the minutes after the shooting. He said Gagnon and the man he later learned was Melanson stepped inside the hall briefly. Surveillance video shows they were inside the hall for 30 and 17 seconds respectively.
"I heard somebody come in and say, 'Is everybody OK? Is anybody hurt,' or something along that line. And I responded back, 'No. All four of us are OK,'" Westlake recounted.
Gagnon, in his Serious Incident Response Team interview later on April 19, 2020, said after checking the group was OK he told the other two officers, "Everybody's good in there."
Westlake and the firefighters all said no one explained who shot at them or why.
On Monday in Halifax, Muise said they felt like "hostages." He said things would have been different if the Mounties had identified themselves and relayed the group was safe.
"You know, 'We're RCMP, we're here, we're sorry, what's going on in there, we'll be back to talk to you.' Nothing. We had nothing, just like we were shoved under a rug somewhere and left," he said.
Brown said he circled the building, unsure if the actual gunman was on the property, and learned after that everyone inside was fine.
"I was upset. I wasn't crying or upset in that way. I was just upset because … I knew that that's a big deal. We just discharged our weapons. I've never discharged my weapon while on duty other than to put down an animal," he said in his interview with the commission.
Surveillance video from the hall shows Brown and Melanson were at the hall for less than five minutes. They left to continue their pursuit of the gunman.
Meanwhile, the four men in the hall continued hiding and learned that the RCMP had tweeted that Wortman, who by that point had killed 19 people, had been spotted in the Onslow-Belmont area at the same time the shots had erupted.
At one point, Westlake looked outside and didn't see Gagnon's car — which the officer had moved away from the front of the building — so he told the group they should move between the fire trucks so they'd be better protected, he explained to the commission investigators. They didn't emerge from the hall for about an hour and after calling people to find out what was happening.
$40K in damage
Brown and Melanson left behind nearly $40,000 worth of damage, including to one of the fire trucks, a monument and an electronic sign at the end of the parking lot near to where they fired.
"You could see where the bullets they came through that door just like it wasn't even there. If they would have hit one of us, it would've been the end of us. Big time," Ellison testified Monday.
Westlake told the commission's investigators that in the weeks that followed the incident, he went to the RCMP to demand they cover the costs of damage to the fire hall and continued to work with them, assisting with the search for a missing child, and made inquiries to check in on how Gagnon was doing.
"I fought very hard with the RCMP to pay the bills, to get rid of the scars at the fire hall because at lot of people were driving by and looking at it," Westlake said.
But he told the inquiry that even as he outwardly made jokes about the experience at the fire hall and tried to process it with humour, it was taking its toll.
"For 30 years I witnessed a lot of trauma, but … this was more than what I could ever expect. And it took me a long time to say it's not my fault this occurred. And I don't really care if anybody views me as broken….. I don't want this to happen to anybody else," Westlake said.
He said he struggled to understand — knowing that the officers would've been aiming at his centre of mass — why the two officers chose to employ lethal force based on the visual of something as common as a safety vest.
"I've never had malice to the two individuals that pulled the trigger. I still don't to this day. I want to meet them. I want to ask them how they missed," he said.
No 'blue on blue'
Brown never disputed that he was aiming to stop Westlake and took issue with the how the fire hall incident has been considered a "blue on blue" situation, where a police officer shot at one of his own.
He said his target was always the man in the safety vest and had he wanted to shoot the cruiser, he would have hit it. He said the man was an "identical match" to the description of the gunman given to him earlier by Lisa Banfield, the shooter's spouse, and from another RCMP officer, Const. Rodney Peterson.
Banfield had given Brown the information while she was in the back of an ambulance that morning after she emerged from the woods in Portapique after escaping the gunman the night before. Peterson passed the gunman on the road in Glenholme, N.S., and relayed a description of him back to his colleagues.
In his inquiry interview, Brown said having GPS on RCMP officers' portable radios activated, enabling the risk manager in telecoms to monitor locations, "would have changed a lot of things."
'Desperately wanted to get that guy'
Brown's interview with the public inquiry, a transcript of which was released, was the first in-depth description of what prompted he and Melanson to start firing. He previously provided a statement to the police watchdog agency that investigated and cleared Brown and Melanson of any criminal wrongdoing, finding they had reasonable grounds to believe they were firing at the killer.
Brown and his partner Melanson had been working since 3 a.m., called in to help with the investigation into what was happening in Portapique, N.S.
Hours after interviewing Banfield, the pair were in Great Village when calls came in about a shooting in Wentworth, N.S., so they put on their hardbody armour and rushed to their cars, racing toward reported sightings with their carbines at their side.
"I remember thinking, like, we're going to be in a position where we might be able to get this guy," Brown told the commission. "We desperately wanted to get that guy."
The fire hall incident wasn't the first time they came across a cruiser and wondered if it was the suspect. As they headed toward a sighting in Glenholme, they spotted the marked vehicle belonging to Const. Rodney MacDonald and stopped 50 metres away, radioing to confirm who it was.
In the hour that followed the fire hall shooting, the pair came upon the scene where Const. Heidi Stevenson was killed, passed the EHS station where unbeknownst to them a bleeding Const. Chad Morrison was waiting for help, and came upon the distraught daughter of Gina Goulet, the last person murdered.
Brown stressed to inquiry investigators that April 19 was not his first high-stress active shooter situation. He was on the ground in Moncton, N.B., in 2014 when three officers were shot and killed by a gunman and had seen many difficult situations in his 13 years with the force.
"At no point did I feel that I wasn't in control of what I was doing, that the situation was too big for me. I felt, for the most part prepared, as prepared as you could be….. I wasn't running around that day recklessly, you know?" he said.
"I wanted to stop that guy from killing people that day. It was as simple as that."
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