Absent Warning, Victims Died

"I could see a body laying on the side of the road. As I got closer, I could see it was my brother. I got one more step closer and I could see blood and he wasn't moving."
"I shut my flashlight off. I turned around and I ran for my life in the dark. I went up the first cottage road ... I turned around and looked down towards the road I had just run from to see a little flashlight flashing around looking for me."
Clinton Ellison, Portapique, Nova Scotia

"The more time you wait to give an answer, the more difficult it is to explain why you didn't use the dedicated alert system."
"And it's taken too long for them [RCMP] to provide answers."
"I think in order to gain the trust of the public they need to explain why they didn't use the system and be transparent about it."
"They need to ultimately take the fault for that."
Yannick Hemond, risk management specialist, professor, Universite du Quebec a Montreal

"Somewhere, somehow, they hit a wall."
"It would have been helpful yesterday if someone had said: 'We certainly could have done better'."
"It's important for leadership to recognize that more could have been done."
Terry Flynn, crisis and risk communications expert, McMaster University

"Some are asking questions about difficult senior operational decisions, without considering how little information is available to our first responders on the ground protecting the public in the middle of a rapidly evolving and highly dangerous crisis."
"Early speculation in advance of the investigation findings damages the morale of the brave men and women who responded to this situation, and who are grieving the loss of their colleague and community members."
Brian Sauve, president, National Police Federation

"The original call to the RCMP was to one of our members at headquarters. There was then a series of phone calls that had to be made to find the officer in charge, then speak to the incident commander, have a conversation about the issuing of a message."
"So a lot of the delay was based on communications between the EMO and the various officers. And then a discussion about how the message could be constructed and what it would say. In that hour and a bit of consultation, the subject was killed."
Nova Scotia RCMP Chief Supt.Chris Leather 

Care worker and first responder Alicia Cunningham looks at a makeshift memorial for RCMP Constable Heidi Stevenson, in Shubenacadie, N.S., on April 22, 2020.

Nothing, no explanations, no prevarications change the fact that a dreadful situation was unfolding where a psychotic killer, armed and raging, went about sacking and killing and injuring people undeterred in his killing lunacy targeting neighbours, friends, acquaintances, strangers. This was no sudden act of impetuous temporary insanity, but a well-thought-out act of vengeance for reasons yet unknown by a man within whom a sense of personal outrage had long simmered.

He had assembled a personal armoury of a variety of lethal weapons. A collector of old decommissioned police vehicles had him registering several and having one of them restored to emulate a current model with all requisite markings. From some source he acquired a genuine RCMP uniform. The murderous rampage he set out on was unstoppable and horrendous, leading to the deaths of 22 innocent people. From Saturday night to Sunday noon he tracked and hunted his victims.

Police block the highway in Enfield, N.S. on Sunday, April 19, 2020.  THE CANADIAN PRESS/Andrew Vaughan

Some just happened to wander either on foot or in vehicles into his line of operation as he travelled the 100 kilometres from Portapique the seaside rural town where everyone knew everyone else to nearby the city of Truro, maiming and killing people as he went. The RCMP resorted to posting several Tweets, and an alert on Facebook, but though the province's Emergency Measures Organization asked that an red alert go out, it ran into a bureaucratic hold-up.

A simple alert that would warn residents of the area to remain at home while a hunt for a mass killer was underway would have been sufficient to decrease the total number of victims. The alert would have been sent to cellphones and would appear on television screens. But high-level bureaucracy was more invested in a series of drafts to assure wording satisfactory to RCMP standards held to be more important than warning a vulnerable public.

Nothing might have prevented the first seven deaths of those attending a  house party that the killer and his girlfriend had been at before he returned and unleashed his killing agenda. Attending RCMP officers found at that scene in response to 911 calls "multiple casualties" inside and outside of the party house, the shooter gone. That first Twitter message asked people to remain within their homes, a message received by some of the RCMP's Twitter followers.

An RCMP investigator inspects vehicles destroyed by fire at the residence of Alanna Jenkins and Sean McLeod, both corrections officers, in Wentworth Centre, N.S. on Monday, April 20, 2020. A neighbour, Tom Bagley, was also killed on the property. Andrew Vaughan/The Canadian Press

Gabriel Wortman, 51, well known to the villagers, continued his rampage dressed in an RCMP uniform, driving a replica RCMP vehicle. He entered homes, killed residents, set the homes on fire. Returning to his cottage where he had left his girlfriend tied up to find she had escaped, he set that house on fire along with his collection of vehicles. More burned vehicles would follow during his 13-hour frenzy of death-dealing. There were, altogether, 16 separate crime scenes to account for the 22 people he murdered.

Eventually, nearing mid-day on Sunday, two RCMP constables stopping for gas, happened to come across the killer driving a vehicle taken from another of his victims. And unlike his run-ins with two other RCMP officers driving police vehicles, where he shot and seriously injured one and continued driving to come across another whose vehicle he rammed, then shot to death the woman officer with 23 years' experience in the Force, this time it was he who was shot and killed by two other RCMP.

RCMP investigators search for evidence at the location where Const. Heidi Stevenson was killed along the highway in Shubenacadie, N.S. on Thursday, April 23, 2020. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Andrew Vaughan