No charges warranted against N.S. Mounties who shot up fire hall during mass shooting: Ontario watchdog

A second investigation has determined no charges should be laid against two RCMP officers who shot at a fire hall in Nova Scotia on the morning of April 19, 2020.

No one was struck in the incident but it left people badly shaken and distrustful of the RCMP.

The two officers were pursuing a man who was in the midst of a murderous rampage across central Nova Scotia. By the time he was done, 22 people had been killed.

The Onslow Belmont fire hall had been designated as a refuge for people displaced by the shootings.

An RCMP officer in a marked police cruiser was stationed outside the hall for security. The gunman was driving a car that had been made to resemble an RCMP cruiser.

When the two officers, constables Terry Brown and Dave Melanson, came upon the fire hall, they thought the police car out front belonged to the gunman.

The officers brought their unmarked car to a sudden stop in front of the hall and started shooting. They hit a sign, a garage door and one of the fire trucks.

'A lawful excuse' to open fire

The shooting was referred to Nova Scotia's Serious Incident Response Team to determine whether the officers' actions warranted criminal charges. SIRT concluded they did not.

Belmont Onslow Fire Brigade Chief Greg Muise and Deputy Chief Darrell Currie disagreed with the decision. They lobbied for the investigation to be reopened, arguing that new information had come to light during the hearings of the Mass Casualty Commission.

The case was referred to Ontario's Special Investigations Unit for another assessment. It affirmed the SIRT decision in a report issued Friday.

It concluded that the decision to open fire did not constitute criminal negligence in the context of an ongoing manhunt.

"The totality of the evidence establishes that the SOs (subject officers) had reasonable grounds to believe the person they saw, who was disobeying their orders, was the mass murderer who had, in the preceding hour, killed three more persons," the report states. 

"Viewed objectively, in light of the protections afforded to peace officers by Section 25 of the Criminal Code, the totality of the circumstances, in what was a rapidly unfolding series of events, establishes that SO1 and SO2 had a lawful excuse when they discharged their firearms."

Brown and Melanson defended their actions when they testified before the MCC in May 2022.

In an interview with CBC News on Friday, Currie and Muise — who were both at the Onslow Fire Department at the time of the shooting — said they weren't surprised by the decision, but did note the timing of it was poor with the anniversary being this month.

Currie said the Ontario report doesn't appear to be much different from the one Nova Scotia's SIRT released in 2021.

Stress, pain

"I've read through the report once, had a quick chance to look through it once, and it seems what they've done is they've ripped apart the witness statements and taken the RCMP statements as fact," Currie said.

Both say they continue to live with the stress and pain from that day.

"I was a guy that was jolly, got along with everybody," said Muise. He said it's not the same now. "I never thought this would last this long, but it has."

Currie added he feels the same. "It has been hard and … it's continually in the news," he said.

Currie said the RCMP commissioner reached out by email to meet with the two of them to talk about what happened, but that they declined. "There would be no benefit," he said.