Date of publication: 09 Apr 2022 • 1 day ago • 6 minutes reading • 46 comments RCMP cars block the entrance to Portapique Beach Road after the police completed their search for Gabriel Wortman, on April 19, 2020. Photo by REUTERS, archive
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For more than a month now, commissioners in Nova Scotia have been examining the details of one of Canada’s most nightmarish tragedies. Just two years ago this month, 51-year-old Gabriel Wortman used a police car replica to kill 22 people across Nova Scotia: Parents killed in front of their children, couples killed in their homes, women ambushed while sharing coffee to their grandchildren. It is the deadliest mass murder in Canadian history.
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The Mass Accidents Committee, which began holding public hearings in February, has been tasked with finding out the exact details of what happened and proposing reforms to ensure it does not happen again. With the committee on vacation until Monday, here are some of the most amazing details that emerged from the survey.
While the killings were still going on, the police failed to issue a general warning
The excitement occurred in two days. Wortman killed 13 people in the Portapique neighborhood where he owned a cottage, where he also set fire to the homes of many of his victims. Wortman then hid overnight behind a welding shop in Debert, NS, and then started killing again, mostly in roadside locations north and south of Portapique, starting at 6:36 a.m.
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The most controversial part of the investigation surrounds this second day, and the idea that the police might have been able to prevent some of the nine extra murders if they had properly hidden the alarm. More specifically, the police failed to authorize the Alert Ready system, which would send an audible warning to every mobile phone in the area, along with a description of Wortman. One reason was that senior Mounties did not even know about the Alert Ready system. “I did not know,” RCMP District Commander Alan Carroll told the committee. Officers also speculated that the killer had committed suicide after the initial massacre in the Portapique subdivision. As soon as there were reports of murder and arson early in the morning, 30 minutes north of Portapique, police would start sending out warnings with Wortman’s name and description – and it would take another hour to say that Wortman was driving a copy car. police. Many of Wortman’s victims on this second day would have known that a killer was free, but not what was last seen driving.
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It is noteworthy that at least one of Wortman’s apparently wanted victims, Adam Fisher, could have been saved in part because he had previously known that the killer had a copy of the police vehicle. Just before 10 a.m., Wortman pulled out a copy of his police car in front of Fisher Street and then approached the door armed with a rifle. Fisher, who had seen the warning for Wortman and knew he had at least three decommissioned police vehicles, armed himself with a shotgun and hid in the house until the killer left. RCMP police officers Adam Merchant, Aaron Patton and Stuart Beselt, from left to right, the first officers on stage in Portapique, are questioned by the commission adviser to the Mass Casualty Commission in Halifax on March 28, 2022. Photo by THE CANADIAN PRESS, archive In the early hours of the riot, the RCMP almost shot an innocent passerby The only detail from the international front-page investigation was that the first RCMP correspondents narrowly avoided killing an innocent bystander in the chaotic first minutes of the massacre. Three Mounties – Stuart Beselt, Aaron Patton and Adam Merchant – rushed to the scene knowing only that they were responding to a “shot” and that the perpetrator could be driving “what looked like a police car”. What they encountered when they arrived was what Patton described as a “war zone”: corpses on the street, thick smoke from house fires and the constant sound of explosions from propane and gasoline tanks.
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Within 30 minutes of their arrival, police saw a flashlight from the forest and took up positions in order to shoot the figure, believing him to be the killer. When the figure turned off his flashlight and disappeared into the woods, the police did not chase him, believing that they would enter an ambush. The lens was actually held by Clinton Ellison, who had just discovered his brother Corey’s murdered body. Both men were visiting their father when Corey went to investigate a warehouse fire that Wortman had set up. It was while photographing the fire with his cell phone that Corrie was shot and killed by Wortman, around 10:40 p.m. Just 15 minutes later, Clinton found his brother’s body and immediately ran away into the woods believing that Mountain’s lenses were those of the killer.
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In a tweet, RCMP said Wortman may have been wearing an RCMP uniform and driving this car, which “appears to be an RCMP vehicle.” Photo by RCMP, Nova Scotia / Twitter In the middle of the commotion, a police officer saw the killer pass by As details of the massacre have emerged throughout the commission, about 44 people said they came to see Wortman during the killings – meaning they were just seconds away from becoming the same victims. The most notable is the RCMP Cpl. Rodney Peterson, who saw Wortman (with a “worrying grimace”) driving next to him in the opposite direction at 9:47 a.m. on the second day of the slaughter. “If I stop and this is the bad guy, I’ll be shot here, I’ll be killed,” Peterson told investigators. He continued for more than a kilometer before turning, arguing that if he tried to turn the narrow lane of the two-lane highway, he could be ambushed while making a four- or five-point turn. When Peterson was able to start leading in Wortman’s direction, he was unable to find the shooter.
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Not long after, Wortman would actually kill an RCMP officer. Shortly afterwards, Wortman ambushed another officer and wounded him, Const. Heidi Stevenson hit the perpetrator’s vehicle and was killed in an exchange of gunfire that ensued. Fitbit of a victim showed that she was alive for two hours after the police left her dead This is information that has not been included in the investigation so far: The Fitbit of the victim Heather O’Brien, 55, apparently showed her having a heartbeat for several hours after the police announced her death. On the morning of April 19, O’Brien was talking on the phone with her friend Leona Allen when Wortman fired several shots at her parked Volkswagen Jetta. Allen told investigators she heard screams, a “knock, knock, knock” and then nothing. Const. Ian Fahie was one of the first to see O’Brien after the shooting and told the committee she did not show a pulse and her fingers were “cold”. Another officer, Devonna Coleman, would say the same thing. However, both were refuted by Fahie’s police report from that day, which said O’Brien had a “weak pulse” and made “slight noises”.
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Ambulances were not allowed in the area if Wortman returned. Fahie himself would withdraw O’Brien’s daughter, Michaella Scott, as she tried to reach the Jetta. “You have to leave. It’s not safe for you to be here,” Scott told the committee. In a Facebook post earlier this month, the O’Brien family posted data from their Fitbit that showed they had a heart rate by 6 p.m. – almost eight hours after her daughter had tried to get to the spot. “We know this information is controversial,” we read in the post. Fitbit data has not been included in an official procurement account for the events that killed O’Brien, although the commission has reportedly left open the possibility of providing evidence.
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