Politic?

Nova Scotia's Tragedy : A Psychopath on the Loose

"This is by far the worst case I have ever heard of in Canadian history. The whole scenario: the police car, the police uniform, the indiscriminate and targeted shooting of subjects, the number of bodies, the number of crime scenes, it's unheard of."
"I would not expect perfection out of the police response in a case like this because there's nothing that can train you for something like it."
"Darkness, fires, an armed man and you don't know where he is, it adds to the complexity level over 100 percent. You can't just blindly send officers running in to find the suspect. Setting up the perimeter and containment was the absolute right course at that particular time, and it's just unfortunate that he escaped either before or some time after they set it up."
"Mass shootings just don't happen in these [rural] areas. So the police are suddenly confronted with something they have likely never experienced in their life."
"So the first thing you do is set up a perimeter and focus on containment, bringing in additional resources and then you start a methodical search of the area."
David Perry, CEO, Investigative Solutions Network

"I'm sure everyone could imagine what that scene looked like. Multiple victims, multiple structure fires. [They -- police responders -- thought it was a] localized incident [that the killer was in the] heavily locked down [area]."
"We hear the families of the victims full force. They have every right to ask these questions and they have every right to be angry."
"To call this a tragedy would be an understatement."
RCMP Superintendent Darren Campbell

Police block the highway in Debert, N.S. on Sunday after a man disguised as a police officer went on a shooting rampage. (Andrew Vaughan/The Canadian Press)

David Perry, a former detective sergeant with the Toronto Police Services, who in that capacity before resigning from the Force was behind the initiative to launch the first Amber Alert in Ontario in 2003, felt the RCMP certainly should have used an emergency alert in warning to residents of the Portapique-and-beyond geographic area -- to cover all of Nova Scotia -- of the dangerous presence of a mass killer, advising people to remain in their homes for personal safety until such time as the suspect would be taken into custody.

The large perimeter that the RCMP was focused on in an effort to contain the presence of the murderer of at-that-time 13 people in and around the rural Portapique community of 100 permanent residents began at 10:25 p.m. following the discovery of the 13 shooting victims (some injured, most dead) at eight locations and faced with the extenuated simultaneous circumstances of multiple buildings on fire. A chaotic scene altogether, it was even thought the killer might have killed himself.

Darcy Sack, a Shubenacadie, N.S., resident, said she and her friend came across two burning police vehicles and the silver suspect vehicle while out driving on Sunday morning near Highway 102

No such thing, but it was a while before police fully understood that the killer, identified swiftly as Gabriel Wortman, had made good his escape, going on to travel 43 kilometres north wearing a police uniform and driving a look-alike RCMP vehicle. In the horrifying hours to come he would succeed in killing another 12 people. Failure to use the province's Emergency Measure Operation province-wide emergency alert represented a startling lack of decision-making.

The decision to use Twitter and Facebook was an ill-considered measure in alerting a vulnerable population. The first police to respond to the 911 call of an active shooter in Portapique came across a man driving the opposite way out of the only road connecting the community from the highway on his way to hospital. Bleeding from a gunshot wound, he informed the police that a police car driving in the other direction had fired at him; the shooter a middle-aged white man wearing an RCMP uniform.

At some point while police were setting up the perimeter around Portapique the killer had left the area to drive across northern Nova Scotia to reach properties of people known to him and whom he planned to kill. At one house the occupants saw him on arrival carrying a firearm and failed to respond when he banged on their door. On another occasion, shooting to death a couple and their daughter, he also shot to death an elderly man who had seen their house on fire and meant to offer help.

The raging psychopath saw a woman walking along the road with her dog, and shot her to death. He pulled two strangers over in his replica police car and shot each to death on two separate occasions on the highway, burning one vehicle and commandeering the other, torching his police car. A raging pyromaniac as well as a mass murderer, he had set seven buildings, mostly homes, on fire throughout his rampage.

RCMP are shown near a gas station in Enfield, N.S., shortly after the gunman's police chase came to an end around 11:40 a.m. local time. (Eric Woolliscroft/CBC)

Police called in backup inclusive of dogs, tactical officers, helicopters, negotiators, but failed to send out an emergency Orange Alert, vacillating over various drafts while Emergency Services several times urged them to send out an Orange Alert. Had people been advised, they might have stood a better chance protecting themselves from the death that stalked them. Sunday morning north of Portapique in Wentworth, a couple known to Wortman became his victims.

By the time he had racked up 19 people dead, as he drove along the highway, he saw an RCMP constable parked, awaiting the arrival of another constable he had arranged to meet. Constable Chad Morrison, parked in Shubenacadie between the cities of Halifax and Truro, was shot when Wortman pulled alongside. Severely injured, Constable Morrison headed out to a hospital for emergency care, radioing dispatch. He survived the massacre.

But Constable Heidi Stevenson, driving to the arranged destination to meet up with Constable Morrison, did not. As Wortman, still driving that look-alike police car began to approach, he rammed her car, and though Constable Stevenson responded, to engage her attacker he shot her to death. Then he headed south to another home on Highway 224 to kill a woman he knew, and took her car, a red Mazda.

A person with the name Gabriel Wortman is listed as a denturist in the Halifax area on the Denturist Society of Nova Scotia website. He is listed as the owner of this property in Dartmouth, where police were Sunday afternoon. (Eric Woolliscroft/CBC)

He headed south to Halifax where his permanent home and his denturist business was located, but stopped at an Irving Big Stop gas station close by the Halifax airport. Two RCMP officers in a police tactical resources vehicle by chance happened to stop for gas as well. Realizing that they were in close presence to a man sought for mass murder in the province, they confronted him and one officer shot him dead.