MCC Day 72 - First Set of Closing Submissions
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Back to the beginning... where we came from
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Lawyers lay out 'failings' in RCMP response to Nova Scotia mass shooting
Victim's husband says he holds out 'hope' final report will be valuable
The Mass Casualty Commission leading the inquiry into the tragic events of April 18 and 19, 2020, heard final submissions from family members of many victims during hearings in Truro, N.S., either through lawyers or speaking on their own behalf.
Sandra McCulloch of Patterson Law, which represents most of the victims' families, outlined "a great number of failings" including lack of proper training and equipment for RCMP to deal with a mobile, active shooter at night in a wooded area, and a range of communication problems between officers and the public.
The families have also complained about how the RCMP treated them after the massacre, and procedural issues with the commission itself.
"Now is not the time to shy away from assigning accountability, for the fear that it might have the appearance of blame," McCulloch told the commission.
People
hold signs during a rally in Victoria Park in Halifax on July 27, 2020,
calling for a public inquiry into the Portapique mass killing. (Patrick Callaghan/CBC)
"Our clients deserve a frank and honest assessment of what went wrong, prior to, during, and after the mass casualty."
Many victims' family members attended the hearing Tuesday, including Nick Beaton, whose pregnant wife Kristen Beaton was killed the morning of April 19 in the small community of Debert.
Speaking alongside McCulloch outside the inquiry, Beaton told reporters it was important to come in person "because this is our life."
Beaton and other victims' families have been vocal about their disappointment in not being able to directly question major witnesses including the gunman's partner Lisa Banfield or RCMP officers in key positions during the shooting.
He said the inquiry's trauma-informed mandate left him feeling that it protected all other witnesses, while the families of shooting victims have been left "battling through" the process themselves.
On Tuesday, Beaton said there was "a lot more" that could have been done by the commission, but he's waiting until their final report to decide whether anything valuable came from the inquiry families pushed so hard to get.
"There's hope. That's all we've had is hope. I mean, we fought hard to get it, we voiced our concerns along the way. Me and the other family members I know, that's all we have left is hope, because we tried every other avenue," Beaton said.
Tara
Long, sister of Aaron Tuck, who was killed with his partner Jolene
Oliver and their daughter, Emily Tuck, addresses the commission Tuesday.
(The Canadian Press/Andrew Vaughan)
Another family member who lost a loved one let the commissioners know exactly how she felt about the process.
Tara Long's brother Aaron Tuck was killed in Portapique the night of April 18, alongside his wife Jolene Oliver and their teenage daughter Emily Tuck. Long, who represented herself in her final submission to the commission Tuesday, said she's still struggling with what happened that day and afterwards.
She questioned why more Portapique homes weren't evacuated overnight if the RCMP believed the gunman was likely dead by self-inflicted wounds, and how the body of her brother was not found lying in his doorway by an RCMP officer who stopped nearby the morning of April 19. Long also noted the liaison officer for most victims' families texted Tuck on April 19 to see if he was alright, rather than go to his home.
"We have all patiently waited and listened to see when and how this process was going to provide us with answers and we are still waiting. Time has run out," Long said.
Twenty-two
people died on April 18 and 19, 2020. Top row from left: Gina Goulet,
Dawn Gulenchyn, Jolene Oliver, Frank Gulenchyn, Sean McLeod, Alanna
Jenkins. Second row: John Zahl, Lisa McCully, Joey Webber, Heidi
Stevenson, Heather O'Brien and Jamie Blair. Third row from top: Kristen
Beaton, Lillian Campbell, Joanne Thomas, Peter Bond, Tom Bagley and Greg
Blair. Bottom row: Emily Tuck, Joy Bond, Corrie Ellison and Aaron Tuck.
(CBC)
Lawyer McCulloch raised what she called "critical facts" that applied to various victims.
For instance, the first 911 call from victim Jamie Blair about her husband Greg being shot in the rural community of Portapique just after 10 p.m. on April 18 informed police that gunman Gabriel Wortman was driving a mock RCMP cruiser.
But, the inquiry has heard, RCMP quickly speculated the car was an older decommissioned model with no vinyl decals or lights.
There was an "inordinate amount of ball dropping" on gathering and handling intelligence, McCulloch said there seemed to be no structure in place to make sure vital pieces of information didn't fall through the cracks.
She said it's "incomprehensible" that critical incident commander Staff Sgt. Jeff West did not know there were two key witnesses, shooting survivors Andrew and Kate MacDonald, until the next morning.
Many investigative threads weren't followed, McCulloch said, including not following up with the children left hiding and watching the gunman move around the community, or asking other residents in the small community what they could share about the situation.
"Ironically, I'm talking about community members whom the RCMP could have simultaneously warned and potentially brought to safety," McCulloch said. "There was an opportunity of an exchange of valuable information that should have happened and didn't — to everyone's detriment."
She said the RCMP's lack of training is apparent through the decision to only allow one team of three officers into Portapique for hours on April 18, without night vision gear. That was rooted in a fear of being ambushed by the gunman or hit by crossfire with other police.
This, and the lack of tools like GPS to show where members were, has left clients wondering if the children of victims left to hide for hours could have been rescued earlier, or if others' deaths could have been prevented, she said.
Lisa
Banfield, the common-law wife of Gabriel Wortman, testified at the Mass
Casualty Commission inquiry on July 15, 2022. Some families wanted to
directly question her, but were not allowed to do so. (Andrew Vaughan/The Canadian Press)
Various communication issues included "disorganized" command structure with many RCMP responding members unsure who was in charge, McCulloch said. Others, like Sgt. Andy O'Brien, who had been drinking that evening, called in instructions from his own home. Another officer in Portapique did not properly share local knowledge of a back road out of the community.
It was an "egregious" failure to not send timely and accurate information to the public about what was happening, McCulloch said, and in fact misrepresenting the situation by only calling it a firearms complaint in one tweet that stayed up overnight into April 19.
McCulloch also raised concerns over how often RCMP air support was not available, how responding officers reverted to paper maps when they couldn't access detailed computerized ones of Portapique, not informing Truro police about the situation right away, and failing to use the emergency alert system.
The gunman's replica RCMP cruiser that was used in the N.S. mass shooting was created with a decommissioned 2017 Ford Taurus. (Mass Casualty Commission)
Many of the RCMP's mistakes throughout their response came due to "tunnel vision," McCulloch said, where police chose a "most likely" scenario based on what witnesses were telling them, or how officers believed explosions around them meant the gunman was still in Portapique long after he'd left.
McCulloch urged the commission not to view these gaps through the lens of RCMP members who have suggested they were the result of lack of funding and resources during an "unprecedented" event. Instead, they were "basic mistakes that contributed to the unprecedented nature" of the tragedy.
There were also "numerous missed opportunities" for RCMP to build their knowledge of the gunman before the shootings, McCulloch said, since Wortman was no stranger to police given his assault of a teenager years beforehand, and two reports of uttering threats and having illegal guns in 2010 and 2011.
McCulloch also said there was also the report from Portapique neighbour Brenda Forbes in 2013 who said she told the Mounties about the gunman's violence against Banfield. That was refuted by "questionable" evidence from the officer who took her complaint, she said.
Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) had also flagged the gunman for suspected smuggling in the past.
All this prior information taken together and properly investigated could have revealed the gunman to be a person of concern, McCulloch said. The RCMP did have the gunman on their radar, she said, but through a lack of access to various databases, the radar was "turned off again and again."
"Whether this is because he was a wealthy white man who cleverly presented as pro-police and who enjoyed the special attention of an RCMP constable, or whether the RCMP or other policing enforcement agencies just didn't take the time to note and actually investigate these red flags, the result is the same," McCulloch said.
"The perpetrator was subject to no real scrutiny at all, and was left free to devastate our communities as he saw fit."
McCulloch also said victims' families did not begrudge Const. Heidi Stevenson's family their two family liaison officers provided by the RCMP. But they were in "pain" to see the wide gap between how Stevenson's loved ones were supported because they were connected to a fallen RCMP officer, yet only one "overwhelmed" officer dealt with the remaining families for 21 victims.
Over the last seven months, the commission has heard from more than 230 witnesses including 60 who testified at the public hearing. That's on top of the more than 3,300 documents that have also been released.
Everyone who presented Tuesday made it clear that the sheer volume of documents and lack of relevant testimony was a concern.
Lawyer Tara Miller, who represents a relative of Kristen Beaton, said the commission should have heard more evidence about the shootings. She said there was a list of people lawyers wanted to testify during the inquiry, but they only appeared in pre-recorded commission interviews, if at all.
Lawyer
Tara Miller, who represents a relative Kristen Beaton, told the
commission there should have been more testimony about the shooting
rampage itself. (The Canadian Press/Andrew Vaughan)
"To allow for more ... firsthand evidence from witnesses just serves to make sure the evidentiary record for the commissioners is as robust and complete as possible," Miller told reporters outside the inquiry.
During her submission Tuesday, Miller said a commission recommendation should be that a provincial-federal committee be struck to ensure the findings of the inquiry are not lost to time or changes in governments and RCMP leadership. She said the committee should include victims' families, and a website where people can see what's been done.
Miller said the commissions' final recommendations will be the legacy of the mass shooting, and of those whose lives were lost.
"If there is no confidence or faith the recommendations will be … implemented, then the work done by all, and the deep losses suffered by the families, will all be for naught. That cannot be the legacy left," Miller told the commission.
Other lawyers made suggestions Tuesday about updating the "immediate action rapid deployment" (IARD) training to deal with night scenarios in wooded areas like Portapique. They said officers should also be better trained in how to secure crime scenes since some victims were not found for hours.
The commission will continue to hear final submissions from participants for the rest of the week.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
With files from Angela MacIvor
What book.
March 5th, 2021, the RCMP at Valleyfield Quebec seized a van driven by a young local man, William Rainville I believe, that held duffle bags containing 249 new Glock polymer pistols and 249 equally prohibited magazines--freshly smuggled from the US, with a street value estimated at $1,600,000! Almost no msm reported this huge seizure--and not a peep was uttered in the House of Commons. Rainville was guilty and served a year of a mere five year sentence and has been out on day parole for months! Gun smuggling is not a very serious public threat it seems for the Trudeau regime and for the Crown Prosecution Service and our courts, despite all the sanctimonious claims.
From: David Amos <david.raymond.amos333@gmail.
Date: Tue, 20 Sep 2022 18:05:44 -0300
Subject: Re: N.S. Mass Casualty Commission Tara Long finally had her say
today and did a fine job setting the record straight about her concerns EH???
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Tuesday, 20 September 2022
MCC- DAY 76 - Tara Long finally had her say today and did a fine job
setting the record straight about her concerns
MCC- DAY 76 - THE VOICES OF FAMILIES WILL FINALLY BE HEARD. GOD BLESS THE 23
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Date: Tue, 20 Sep 2022 21:05:52 +0000
Subject: Automatic reply: N.S. Mass Casualty Commission Tara Long
finally had her say today and did a fine job setting the record
straight about her concerns EH???
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Subject: Automatic reply: N.S. Mass Casualty Commission Tara Long
finally had her say today and did a fine job setting the record
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Date: Tue, 20 Sep 2022 21:05:49 +0000
Subject: Automatic reply: N.S. Mass Casualty Commission Tara Long
finally had her say today and did a fine job setting the record
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Date: Tue, 20 Sep 2022 21:05:50 +0000
Subject: Automatic reply: N.S. Mass Casualty Commission Tara Long
finally had her say today and did a fine job setting the record
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Bodies of five murder victims weren’t discovered by the RCMP for more than 18 hours after they were killed
The bodies of five victims on the mass murders of April 18/19, 2020 — Joy and Peter Bond, Aaron and Emily Tuck, and Jolene Oliver — were not discovered by the RCMP until 4:45pm on Sunday, April 19, more than 18 hours after they were shot by the killer.
Why the delay?
“It did not occur to me to look for additional [crime] scenes,” said
Sgt. Andy O’Brien, who was in charge of containing crime scenes in
Portapique for much of the day on Sunday.
There were about 30 houses in the community.
At 9:30am on Sunday, six properties comprised four known crime scenes.
Known crime scene #1: The killer’s warehouse, at 136 Orchard Beach Dr., was burned down. Across the road, at 123 Orchard Beach Dr., was the Blair home; Greg Blair’s body was lying on the deck of the house with a 40mm handgun next to his head, and his wife Jamie Blair’s body was inside in the bedroom. Next door, 135 Orchard Beach Dr., was Lisa McCully’s house; McCully’s body was lying on the yard in front of the house, near a fence post. Corrie Ellison’s body was across the road. These three properties were in essence one crime scene.
Known crime scene #2: Somewhat to the north was the Gulenchyn house at 71 Orchard Beach Dr.; the house was still smouldering. Dawn Madsen and Frank Gulenchyn were unaccounted for, but their bodies were later discovered in the remains.
Known crime scene #3: To the west, at 200 Portapique Beach Rd., was the killer’s burned out cottage.
Known crime scene #4: South of the cottage, at 293 Portapique Beach Rd., was the Thomas/Zahl home, which had burned down and was still smoking; Joanne Thomas and John Zahl were unaccounted for, but their bodies were later found in the remains.
That left about two dozen other houses in Portapique. Unbeknownst to police at 9:30am, there were two additional crime scenes, neither of which had been burned down:
Unknown crime scene #1: The home of Joy and Peter Bond at 46 Cobequid Crt. Peter Bond’s body was in the doorway of the home, propping open the door; Joy Bond’s body was a few feet behind him in the living room. The TV was on.
Unknown crime scene #2: The Tuck home at 41 Cobequid Crt. The bodies of Aaron Tuck, Jolene Oliver, and Emily Tuck were all in the living room of the house. The TV was on.
Officers were stationed at the road block at the intersection of Portapique Beach Road and Highway 2, and at each of the known crime scenes. They were to contain the sites until the Major Crime Unit arrived to investigate, thereby preventing the public from disturbing the scenes and maintaining a chain of custody for whatever evidence might be found at them.
Over the course of the next seven hours, RCMP officers containing Portapique maintained their positions. Cst. Nick Dorrington drove around the community looking for other fires or bodies lying on the roadways or in yards but found none; GPS records show he even pulled into the driveway of the Bond home and stayed there for about 30 seconds, but he didn’t report seeing anything. Staff Sergeant Al Carroll said he too drove around the community (Carroll’s vehicle did not have GPS), including onto Cobequid Court, but saw nothing. O’Brien drove from scene to scene, delivering energy bars and water to officers and covering for them so they could take bathroom breaks. There was a lot of sitting around, doing nothing.
Throughout that seven hours, no one made a systematic check of those other two dozen houses in the community.
Killer reemerges
The fake police car. Photo: Mass Casualty Commission
From about 10:30pm on Saturday night, April 18, until around 4am Sunday, RCMP officers in Portapique were dealing with an active shooter situation — hearing explosions (probably gas and propane tanks exploding at fire scenes) and gunfire (probably ammunition exploding in the fires), they believed the killer was still alive and in the community. In reality, the killer had driven away from Portapique in his fake police car at around 10:40pm .
At around 4am, officers heard what they thought was a single gunshot in the woods and a crisis negotiator at the command post had said the killer was likely “closure motivated” and so he may have killed himself in the woods.
After that, there was a lull in action — officers continued to search for the killer or his body and the Blair family dog was rescued, but there was no evident sense of urgency among police.
Then, at 6:30am, Lisa Banfield emerged from the woods, and explained that the killer had a fake police car. The Emergency Response Team (ERT) was sent to the known crime scenes in Portapique to see if any of the burned out vehicles at those scenes could’ve been the fake police car. They weren’t.
At 7:30am, Halifax police obtained a photo of the fake police car from Banfield’s sister and sent it to the RCMP. Soon after, a BOLO (be on the lookout for) was issued to police across the province; a description of the car was given, and notice that it could be “anywhere in the province.” The public was not alerted.
Beginning at 9:04am, the ERT was slowly evacuating residents in Portapique, starting at the northern end of Orchard Beach Road, and making their way south. Residents were directed to attend a “comfort station” established for evacuees at the Onslow Belmont Fire Hall. Over the next half hour, the ERT made it as far as Richard Ellison’s house on Orchard Beach Road, but not yet to Cobequid Court, along the beach at the south end of the community. Ellison was at the fire hall when it was fired upon by RCMP members.
At about 9:35am, 911 was notified about the killing of Lillian Campbell in Wentworth, at the hands of a man driving what looked like an RCMP cruiser. There was no doubt this was the mass murderer, and so all available RCMP resources were deployed to pursue the killer. Those resources included the ERT and other officers then in Portapique.
With so many officers leaving Portapique, Staff Sgt. Al Carroll was worried about scene crime containment in the community, so he and Sgt. Andy O’Brien travelled from the incident command post in Great Village to Portapique.
“We got out and talked with the guys, repositioned our guys around the site, and we just waited there, we stayed there,” Carroll told Mass Casualty Commission (MCC) investigators on November 10, 2021. “We’re just maintaining the scene, maintaining continuity for any investigative purposes, for further investigation, keeping people out of the scene.”
Carroll put O’Brien in charge of scene containment, and O’Brien made sure there was someone stationed at each known crime scene.
O’Brien did not speak directly with MCC investigators, and he has been granted witness “accommodation” such that his testimony before commission on May 30 and 31 will not be public, nor will he be cross-examined by lawyers representing victims’ families. He did, however, submit written responses to MCC investigators’ questions on January 28, 2022.
“Each scene, or house, at Portapique had a member, with police car, stationed in proximity to the scene,” wrote O’Brien. “That member was responsible for maintaining continuity of the scene, assuring that no one approached the scene and that evidence was preserved. This was accomplished visually, and with foot patrols of the scene, if appropriate. Some scenes were burned out basements that could entirely be observed without moving from one spot.”
“No members were sent to any other locations in Portapique while I was on scene,” continued O’Brien. “I was not aware that there were other scenes. It did not occur to me to look for additional scenes.”
Neither did it occur to O’Brien to continue the evacuation of Portapique that the ERT had abandoned when it left the community to pursue the killer.
Autopsy reports for the Bonds, Tucks, and Oliver show that their injuries were such that they died either instantly or very soon after being shot. But from 9:30am through until 4:46pm, it was still unknown if there were any other victims who may had been injured but not killed, and who therefore needed medical attention. No one was looking for such potential victims, however.
Cst. Nick Dorrington at Portapique
Cst. Nick Dorrington had given a speeding ticket to the killer on February 12, 2020, and as was Dorrington’s practice when issuing a ticket, he took a photo of the killer’s driver’s licence; in the early hours of April 19, that photo was distributed to all police officers.
Dorrington was positioned at Brown Loop when Carroll and O’Brien arrived in Portapique around 10am.
O’Brien repositioned Dorrington and Cst. Trent Lafferty to the Lisa McCully crime scene. Lafferty was to maintain that scene, but O’Brien directed Dorrington “to do kind of a quick drive around Portapique to see if I see anything crazy, if there’s any more fatalities on front lawns, and so forth, and any more structural fires that hadn’t been reported,” Dorrington told MCC investigators in an interview on November 9, 2021. “So I do a quick loop through, nothing in particular, so I return to the first scene that he wanted me to return to and hold [the McCully scene]. So I go there.”
Cst. Nick Dorrington enters Cobequid Court. May: Mass Casualty Commission
GPS data from Dorrington’s vehicle shows he arrived at the intersection of Orchard Beach Drive and Cobequid Court at 10:19:15am, then travelled north to just past the intersection of Orchard Beach Drive and Portapique Crescent, before again travelling south to Cobequid Court.
He turned right, passed the driveway to the Tuck home at 41 Cobequid Court and went to the western end of Cobequid Court, which is at the Bond home at 46 Cobequid Court. Dorrington was positioned in front of the Bond home for 28 seconds, from 10:26:47am to 10:27:15am.
Cst. Nick Dorrington travelled to the southern end of Portapique. Map: Mass Casualty Commission
Dorrington then drove back to the intersection of Cobequid Court and Orchard Beach Drive and south to make a loop around the beach, then back to the same intersection, east on Cobequid Court to Bayview Court. At this point, Dorrington was about 20 metres from the entrance to blueberry field road — which MCC investigators say was the route the killer took to escape Portapique the night before.
Dorrington continued south on Bayview Court to its end, and then reversed himself, again passing the entrance to the blueberry field road on his way to returning to the McCully scene.
Dorrington seems not to have noticed anything wrong with any of the scenes. In his interview with MCC investigators, he was not asked directly about the Bond home or about the blueberry field road. He is not currently scheduled to testify before the commission.
At 1:38pm, Lafferty noticed a man driving near Lafferty’s position at the McCully house. “That problem will be solved in a second,” radioed Dorrington. But O’Brien got on the radio to say that the man lived in Portapique and had stayed through the night; he was going to the store to buy infant formula for his three-month old baby. “I asked him to stay home,” radioed O’Brien.
Staff Sgt. Al Carroll and the blueberry field road
The entrance to the blueberry field road from Cobequid Court. Photo take by Mass Casualty Commission staff on Aug. 23, 2021
In his interview with MCC investigators and again in his sworn testimony before the commission last week, Carroll said that he had driven through Portapique sometime between 10am and noon on April 19, but noticed no other crime scenes.
“I drove down that road [Cobequid Court], there was a nice house on the left-hand side and at the end of that road was an entryway into the blueberry field,” Carroll told MCC investigators. “And that morning, when I was there, I said, ‘Oh, there’s a barrier up.’ There was a chain barrier, a chain or wire across the top, and there was some type of marking thing to identify the chain was there… So, that chain was definitely in place and if that’s the egress point that [the killer] used, I’m saying he would have had to stop, take the chain out, take — take the — take the wire chain off, drive — drive the car through and re— put the chain back in place, put it back up. Otherwise, the height would have cleaned the light bar or anything off the roof of a car.”
Asked about the house he passed, Carroll said that “something tells me that when I was driving down there that I looked up at that house and I thought I saw somebody on the deck. I recall waving at them.”
Carroll didn’t say why he didn’t instruct the person on the deck to evacuate, or why he didn’t send an officer to escort them out of the community.
That house, at 2 Cobequid Crt., belonged to Debra Thibeault. It was immediately adjacent to the entryway to the blueberry field road. Thibeault told MCC investigators that she had permission from the owner of the blueberry field to use the blueberry field road and it was her normal way from Highway 2 to her house. There was a rope — not a chain — across the entryway at Cobequid Court. “We always put the rope back up because it’s private,” she explained.
Thibeault lived alone at her Portapique property, as her husband Peter, who worked for the Navy, wasn’t allowed to live so far from the ships. However, she would often stay with him in Halifax. On Saturday, April 18, 2020, she made a Costco run and then visited with Peter; it was snowing, so she stayed with him overnight. She wasn’t allowed to return to Portapique for several days, as it was a crime scene. Which means, she wasn’t at 2 Cobequid Crt. on Sunday morning, when Carroll said he waved at somebody on the deck.
When Thibealt did return to her Portapique home, she noticed that the gate to the blueberry field had been destroyed.
“I was like, ‘Geez, where’s the posts?'” she said. “And the posts, whoever drove through, broke them in two.”
Thibeault took photos of the broken fence posts, which have been entered as MCC exhibits. She insisted that when she left Portapique on Saturday, April 18, the rope was properly in place.
Carroll’s and Thibeault’s testimony directly contradict each other. Thibeault had several years’ experience with the blueberry field road and the entryway to it at Cobequid Court, and had regularly put the rope back across it. Carroll, for his part, had never seen the blueberry field road or the entryway to it until, he says, he saw it on April 19.
Carroll’s version is uncorroborated by any other evidence or witness accounts. But if his testimony, under oath, were true, it would suggest that the killer did not use the blueberry field road to exit Portapique. And if the killer did not travel out of the community on the blueberry field road then the multiple mapping errors in the early hours of April 19 and Carroll’s failure to recognize the blueberry field road as a potential exit route would not be so significant.
Families worry about their loved ones
Jolene Oliver, Emily Tuck, and Aaron (Friar) Tuck. Photo: GoFundMe
After he learned of the Lillian Campbell murder, Cst. Nick Dorrington texted his wife, Dawn Dorrington.
“I tell her to shelter in place,” Dorrington told MCC investigators in an interview on November 9, 2021. “We have in-laws in the house, and I said, ‘Go down with them and shelter in place. Don’t answer the door.’ My concern was that I was the last one that had contact with him [the killer] and gave him a nice, healthy ticket, and so he’s clearly motivated. You know, he knows that he’s going up for murder and to take out, you know, a cop on the way is nothing to him. So I informed her of that, to shelter.”
It’s unknown if other RCMP officers had contacted their families members, but Dawn Dorrington called her friend Lynn MacKeigan to warn her of the danger, and soon there was an informal text tree of warnings that also reached Sandra McCulloch, a lawyer with Patterson Law, which who now represents many of the victims’ families. On April 19, McCulloch was at home in Elmsdale, outside playing with her kids, not far from the path of the killer.
“I get a text message from a friend at 11:25 telling me of the direction to stay inside and lock doors, and that there was an active shooter in the area,” said McCulloch. “She received a call from a friend of hers who had family who were RCMP members, and they conveyed a private alert to their loved ones.”
“So that’s how I learned of the mass casualty event — not through Twitter, not through Facebook, not through Alert Ready, but because I was lucky to have a friend who had a member of the RCMP as a family member, who was alerting their loved ones.”
Worrying about relatives is an understandably human response. When the public became aware Sunday morning that something terrible had happened in Portapique, people began contacting 911 because they couldn’t reach family members who lived in the community to see if they were safe. Some of those calls were forwarded to RCMP officers in Portapique.
A full accounting of those family calls will be published at a later date by the MCC, but some of the calls are related in a document released last week.
Cst. Nick Dorrington’s handwritten notes record two of those calls asking for well-being checks:
10:20am: Call from Justin to confirm well-being of Parent Elizabeth and Thomas Zahl at 293 Portapique Beach Road (as of 14:40 Justine [sic] still had not heard from either parent.
11:10am: Cheryl Blackie requested a well-being check on Aaron Tuck at 41 Cobequid Court.
Despite that request for a check on Aaron Tuck at his house, his body wasn’t discovered until more than five and a half hours later.
Joy Bond and Peter Bond. Photo: Facebook.
After Cpl. Rodney Peterson passed the killer on Highway 4 without recognizing him, Peterson ended up attending to the scene of the murder of Heidi Stevenson and Joey Webber in Shubenacadie. He was then directed to relieve officers who had been working through the night in Portapique. It’s unclear when Peterson arrived in Portapique, but in the afternoon on Sunday, well-being calls were forwarded to him.
Peterson’s written report shows that he received a call at 3:11pm from Tara Long, who was looking for her brother, Aaron Tuck, who lived at 41 Cobequid Court.
“Apparently her brother lived in Portapique and she couldn’t get a hold of him,” Peterson later told MCC investigators. “At that time, I knew a lot of people had been diverted from Portapique, the residents, to the fire hall or something like that as like a comfort zone… And so I said, ‘Well, he might be there, you know, I don’t know for sure.’ I got his name and whatnot. So from there, I contacted a corporal down and working… I called him up and he says, ‘Yeah, I can’t do it right now… I’m the only one here at my post.'”
At 3:50pm, Peterson received a call from Rebecca MacKay, who also wanted a well-being check. It’s unclear who MacKay was asking about.
Peterson was annoyed by the calls. He called dispatch to complain.
“I said, ‘Listen, you know, I don’t think we should be taking these calls,” said Peterson. “We’re trying to do things out here. Is there any way somebody else can take these calls?”
After that, well-being calls were taken by Cst. Dave Lilly at the dispatch centre.
Finally, at 4:46pm, Cpl. Jarrett MacDonald had the time to check on the Tuck home at 41 Cobequid Crt., which Peterson had told him about an hour and a half before. But MacDonald went to the wrong house — he arrived at 46 Cobequid Crt., the Bond home. He discovered the body of Peter Bond in the doorway, and saw Joy Bond dead behind him.
MacDonald then went to the correct address and discovered the bodies of Aaron Tuck, Jolene Oliver, and Emily Tuck.
Only then did RCMP officer begin checking other residences in Portapique.
About Tim Bousquet
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/shooting-victims-portapique-nova-scotia-alberta-1.5538557
'They died together': Family of 3 killed in Nova Scotia shooting rampage remembered
'No matter how hard it was, they always stayed together. They always focused on family'
Visitors were rare. The doors were never locked.
The tree-lined property was often filled with the lively hum of their teenage daughter Emily playing the violin.
For Oliver, who grew up in Calgary, living off the grid was a new adventure. For Tuck, the quaint house and the hard work that came with it had always been home.
His father had built it to be sturdy and self-sufficient, and they worked hard to maintain his legacy.
In an interview with CBC News on Monday, Jolene Oliver's sister, Tammy Oliver-McCurdie, said all three family members were found dead inside the home Sunday.
Jolene Oliver was 40 years old. Aaron Tuck was 45. Emily Tuck was 17. They are among the victims of one of the deadliest mass killings in Canadian history.
RCMP now confirm at least 18 people, including an RCMP officer, were killed in the rampage. The gunman was fatally shot by police who responded to 911 calls about gunfire and pursued him through several communities.
'They've always stuck together'
The senselessness of the deaths of Oliver, Tuck and their teenage daughter has left other members of their family haunted.
"For 20 years, they've had quite the journey, and they've always stuck together," Oliver-McCurdie said.
"No matter how hard it was, they always stayed together. They always focused on family and staying together.
"There were times when they literally had nothing, but they always stuck together. At least they died together."
Oliver and Tuck met years ago in Alberta. She was a waitress and he was one of her regular customers. They moved to Nova Scotia two years ago when his mother became ill and eventually inherited the family home.
Tuck, known to his friends as "Friar," worked as a mechanic. Oliver continued working as a waitress, a job she loved.
"She just loved connecting with people and helping and listening," Oliver-McCurdie said in a phone interview from her home in Red Deer, Alta.
"She is amazing. She's my best friend. She was always so wise. She had the weirdest wisdom."
'She didn't even get to live her life'
Emily, just a few weeks shy of high school graduation, was deciding whether she wanted to pursue a career in music or in welding.
Adept at violin, she was also a budding mechanic after a childhood spent tinkering with cars in the garage with her father.
"She didn't even get to live her life. She had so much potential ... so much love, so smart, so caring, so humble," Oliver-McCurdie said.
"Emily was amazing. She loves mechanics and playing music and she loved reading books.
"And when you can get her to really smile, she can light up an entire community. She was pretty cool."
They didn't need to spend money to make memories.
- Tammy Oliver-McCurdie
In recent weeks, with the coronavirus pandemic shuttering business across the country, money was tight.
Oliver-McCurdie said she takes comfort in knowing they spent their final days together without distraction, taking walks and playing music together as a family.
One of the last Facebook posts from the family was a video of Emily playing the violin for her father in the living room.
"They got to spend the last few weeks together as a family and just enjoy each other's company," she said. "They were having fun.
"They didn't need to spend money to make memories. They just persevered and they just made the best of every situation and worked with what they had and made a great life."
WATCH | A video of Emily Tuck, 17, playing violin for her father posted to Facebook:
The shooting rampage began late Saturday in Portapique, a quiet community about 40 kilometres west of Truro.
The violence didn't end until 12 hours later when the gunman was killed after being intercepted by officers about 90 kilometres away in Enfield, north of Halifax.
The shooter was not a stranger to the family. He lived on the adjacent property.
Oliver-McCurdie said she'd heard of tense exchanges between the family and their neighbour in the past, but nothing that would foreshadow the deaths of so many.
'We don't have any answers'
As details of the rampage hit the news in bits and pieces, Oliver-McCurdie began to worry. Her sister wasn't answering the phone.
Her niece's social media accounts had gone silent.
Watching the news break from nearly 5,000 kilometres away, she felt helpless. She thought of buying a plane ticket.
She prayed that they had run into the woods for cover. Or maybe they were injured in hospital.
More than 10 agonizing hours later, a call from the RCMP confirmed her worst fears.
The waiting was torture. Knowing the truth has left her with a grief so suffocating she finds it difficult to breathe, she said.
The bodies of her family members will remain inside the home until Tuesday. Police have told her little else.
"We don't have any answers on what happened. I have a lot of questions."
Oliver-McCurdie has been left to wrestle with her questions as she plans two funerals. Because of the pandemic, family members on opposite sides of the country will not be able to grieve together.
Oliver-McCurdie said the family is taking solace in all the messages of support they have received from people in Portapique, from Canadians across the country, and from other grieving families.
The tragedy should serve as a reminder to hold loved ones close, she said.
She had a falling out with her sister years ago and regrets the time they lost.
"By the grace of God, I was able to mend that in the last few months. I just wish I called her more, now knowing that I had such limited time.
"If there are people out there, if there's anybody in their life that they need to mend a fence with, do it sooner than later because you never know. You never know."
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