St. Albert family drove into ‘line of fire’ on Highway 16

It was a day the Hargreaves family isn’t likely to forget anytime soon after their Easter weekend road trip brought them up close and personal to a gun battle that would leave a Calgary murder suspect dead and a Mountie wounded.

Steven Hargreaves, his wife and his two children were on their way to Jasper from St. Albert for a ski trip on Thursday, driving westbound on Highway 16 when Hargreaves says he came across what he first thought was a police check stop.

“There was a few people pulled over and things like that, they looked liked they were pulling over speeders or whatever,” he said.

He remembers seeing a few police cars drive past him going eastbound, then spin around and head westbound.

“We still didn’t really think anything of it, but then we came over the brow of a hill and there was five police cruisers … between the highways.”

That’s when he says he saw about 15 police vehicles in the distance coming towards him on the other side of the highway, headed straight towards what he believes was a blue Ford Explorer with a blown out tire lurching along in the westbound lanes.

The chase took a dramatic turn as the driver positioned the vehicle at an angle in the middle of the road, Hargreaves said.

Jumping out of the vehicle, the driver had what Hargreaves described as a semi-automatic assault rifle in his hand and was wearing a large, bulky hunting jacket.

“Looking back, he was obviously positioning his car so he could get out and give them the beans, so to speak, with this weapon.”

Hargreaves said he was around 20 metres away from the armed driver, who dropped down to one knee. That’s when he says the shooting started.

“At that point, they started really unloading on each other it was kind of like ‘pop-pop-pop-pop,’ ” adding his family ’s minivan — with his two young children in the back seat — was in the shooter’s “line of fire.”

Even though he said there were around 30 officers that he could see in the area, as far as Hargreaves could tell there was only one Mountie in position to engage the driver.

“(My wife) said ‘go go go’ and I screamed at the kids ‘get down, get down’ and they all laid down, the wife laid down, I slid right down so I could barely see through the window. I just gunned it,” he said.

On Thursday, Abderrahmane (Adam) Bettahar — the suspected killer of 22-year-old Nadia El-Dib — was killed in the gunfight witnessed by the Hargreaves family, the victim’s family confirmed.

Bettahar led police on a chase on Thursday until police successfully deflated the vehicle’s tires near Nojack, RCMP said, with the vehicle coming to a stop on Highway 16 about 100 kilometres west of Edmonton.

Sgt. Brian Topham, commander of the Evansburg detachment, suffered non-life-threatening injuries, the province’s independent watchdog said.

Investigators believe El-Dib and Bettahar were in a relationship for a short time before the slaying, although the motive for her killing is not known. The Alberta Serious Incident Response Team is investigating the shooting.

Hargreaves said his children were not too shaken up by the incident, but said he has gained a new appreciation for law enforcement after witnessing the shooting.

“These police officers, that’s part of what they do and part of their expectation,” he said.