A former Mountie is standing by his account of disputing testimony that RCMP failed to respond to a 2013 domestic violence call involving the Nova Scotia mass shooter. Troy Maxwell, a retired RCMP constable, told a public inquiry Tuesday that he had only spoken to Brenda Forbes about an allegation that her neighbor, Gabriel Wortman, was driving recklessly in the community of Portapique, NS, in a decommissioned police car and that “he was warlike.” Forbes, however, testified before the inquest that he told police Wortman — responsible for killing 22 people on April 18-19, 2020 — had pinned his wife, Lisa Banfield, to the ground in July 2013 with witnesses present. and that nothing was done about it. She has denied during her deposition that she simply called the police to file a “disruption” report for reckless driving, as Maxwell claims. The investigation attempts to sort out conflicting accounts of details of the killer’s domestic violence before the mass murder. His mandate includes looking at gender-based violence — and how it relates to killings. On Tuesday, Maxwell did not back down from his April 29 interview with investigators, reiterating that Forbes had called in a complaint to the RCMP that Wortman was “ripping off” Portapique in an old police car at about 10 a.m. on July 6. , 2013. He testified that he gathered some information with a follow-up call to Forbes, downloaded some names and drove to the community. Maxwell also testified that he believed he had seen a Ford Crown Victoria — a police car model widely used until about 2011 — in Wortman’s yard when he went to the killer’s house at “dusk” that day to inform him of the complaint. However, last Friday, Banfield testified that she and Wortman did not own a decommissioned police vehicle in 2013. Also, the investigation said the killer only purchased four decommissioned Ford Taurus police vehicles in 2019. Forbes stood by its version of events. She told the inquest she had called the RCMP and later met with two police officers at her office in Debert, NS, and told them she had spoken to a witness who saw Banfield pinned to the ground and choked by Wortman. Banfield confirmed the attack in her own testimony. Maxwell told the inquest Tuesday that Banfield’s testimony did not change his version of what happened. “I remember back in the day they would take the old Crown Victoria (police) cars, strip them down and put them up for auction and you’d see people driving around in them,” he testified. “There was definitely in my mind a Crown Vic in that (Wortman’s) yard. That’s my memory.” Asked by panel counsel Emily Hill if Forbes had ever told him about the attack, he replied: “No ma’am.” Also, in his version, Maxwell said he only visited Forbes at Debert after investigating her complaint at Portapique. His memory is hazy as to exactly when he made that visit. She said she went to Debert to let her know the investigation into the “disturbance” was closed. Meanwhile, Maxwell’s memory of which officers — if any — accompanied him to Portapique to investigate what he claimed was a disturbance complaint and to meet Forbes at Debert has changed over the past two years. The constable told an RCMP investigator in June 2020 that Const. Karl MacIsaac went with him to Debert in 2013 to meet with Forbes and that Cpl. Kenda Sutherland was with him at Portapique. However, he testified Tuesday that his recollection now is that MacIsaac had accompanied him to Portapique, while he struggled to remember who, if anyone, accompanied him to Debert. The inquest said in summary documents that neither MacIsaac nor Sutherland had notes or specific recollections about visiting the towns with Maxwell. The full police report on the July 6, 2013 response to Forbes’ complaint was removed from police records in 2015. Maxwell said the lack of a written record makes it difficult for him to explain why he wrote Lisa Banfield’s first name or the name of a witness to the attack — Glen Wortman, the killer’s uncle — in his notes. “I’m not erasing anything but my memory. You have to understand that I can give you excerpts, but as far as the record goes, I don’t have it,” he testified. Joshua Bryson, a lawyer for the family of victims Peter and Joy Bond, asked Maxwell why he did not seek statements from the people whose names he wrote down before closing the complaint. Maxwell replied that he had other cases to attend to. “We don’t have the ability to sit around and say, ‘Oh yeah, we’re going to spend an hour on this.’ Bryson also questioned how Maxwell testified he remembered knocking on the door of Wortman’s Portapique residence at “dusk” in July after 7 p.m., when the constable’s shift was recorded in the notes as ending at 5 p.m. Maxwell said he couldn’t remember exactly when his shift ended that day, but he did remember visiting Portapique at a time when the interior lights in homes in the neighborhood were on. This report by The Canadian Press was first published on July 19, 2022.
