THE ORLÉANS STANDOFF OF 1990
Residents recall 12½ tense hours on Christmas 25 years ago, when a heavily-armed man was holed up in their neighbourhood
Gary Bowie had just gone out to pick up pizza for supper, while his wife, Nicole, readied for their outing that evening to her sister’s house in Hunt Club. Their 14-yearold son, Scott, was in the shower when the police knocked at the front door.
Across the street, Rod Ferguson, along with his wife Jo-Ann and three daughters, Jennifer, Kristin and Trisha, were at home, getting ready to attend the Christmas Eve service at Orléans United Church. Unbeknownst to any of them, Jennifer’s boyfriend, Kirk Gidley, was on his way over from his house a block away. The 22-year-old Gidley had sold his prized possession — a 100-watt Marshall amplifier — to pay for an engagement ring, and had settled his nerves with a drink or two before heading over to pop the question. He couldn’t propose that night, as police barricades set up at either end of the street prevented him from reaching the Fergusons. “I couldn’t even sneak through,” he recalls.
So instead of a young paramour bent on matrimony ringing the their front door bell, the Fergusons were greeted first by a Gloucester police constable warning them to go hide in their basement, and subsequently by a tactical team member, dressed in black, who set up a command post in their living room. From the family room in the back of the house, Rod watched as more law enforcement officers, these ones dressed in white, scaled the backyard fence.
It was Dec. 24, 1990. Just before 5 p.m., as twilight was giving way to darkness on Burgundy Lane – a short crescent of 40 mostly semidetached homes in Orléans – Paulette Seguin, and her daughter pulled into their shared driveway.
It was a tense holiday season for Seguin. Her 12-year marriage to Wayne Ratte was at an end, and she had told him to be out of the house by Jan. 1.
An alcoholic at the time, Ratte had previously threatened Seguin during previous binges. On this evening, the 43-year-old had been drinking at a nearby bar. When Seguin walked in the house, he was sitting in a chair, a 12-gauge double-barrelled Beretta shotgun resting across his lap, a high-powered hunting rifle nearby.
Seguin and her daughter managed to run to a neighbour’s house to call the police. Two minutes later, the first shots were fired in what became a 12½-hour standoff that forced 100 residents from their homes or into their basements, and called more than 50 police officers from four different enforcement agencies — Gloucester, Ottawa, OPP and RCMP — as well as numerous paramedic, hydro and fire responders, into action. When it was over, at 5:20 in the morning of Christmas Day, 15 shots had been fired — all by Ratte, and most into household possessions such as the fridge, dishwasher and bed.
Three shots, however, were fired outside. A quarter-century later, Nicole Bowie, who lived in the house adjoining Ratte and Seguin’s, recalls that Ratte had let his dog, Gizmo, into the backyard to relieve itself, and that when it didn’t return promptly, fired shots in the air to hurry it along.
For Gloucester police constable Reggie Allman, just 18 months on the job, it was a possibly much more serious scenario than that. He was going from door to door, urging residents to turn off their lights and take shelter in their basements, when he heard a shot. Then he heard a fellow officer shout “He just shot at Reggie! He shot at Reggie!”
“That didn’t feel good,” says Allman, now a detective with the Ottawa police. Police were already aware that there might be marital problems at the root of the developing standoff. “Those are always tough situations ... For a lot of people, Christmas is a happy time. But it can at times be pretty harsh. We get called to situations where people need help.”
As a precaution, the Queensway between Jeanne D’Arc Boulevard and Montreal Road, which Ratte and Seguin’s backyard overlooked, was closed.
“They were worried he was shooting at passing cars,” recalls Nicole Bowie.
When police informed her that the gunman was in fact in the other half of her double, with a rifle powerful enough to rip through the walls, she got Scott out of the shower and the two of them descended into the basement, where she ironed clothes while he played video games. “I remember he went and got his BB gun and said, ‘I’m ready’,” says Nicole. “I told him to put it away.
“When I got in the basement, a little voice said to me, ‘Do not be afraid. You just have to wait it out’.”
Across the street, the Fergusons stayed in their basement or in the family room in back of the house, getting whatever news they could from the radio. At about 10 p.m., Rod later recalled, “it seemed like (the police) were gearing up to use tear gas, but just then the man let his dog into the house and the police said he seemed rational and coherent.”
At about 11 p.m., Nicole and Scott gathered up their presents and sneaked out, walking to the end of the street to meet Gary and the then-cold pizza, and head to her sister’s house.
At midnight, police cut power to many of the homes, allowing those residents affected to leave. The hydro was restored at about 4 a.m.
One by one, as the long night passed, Rod’s wife and daughters called it a night and went to bed. Rod stayed awake throughout, drinking coffee.
Just before 5:30 a.m., Ratte surrendered. He was handcuffed, put in a cruiser and taken to the Gloucester Police headquarters.
Ratte was charged with pointing a firearm, possession of a weapon dangerous to public peace, discharging a firearm and uttering a death threat, and was remanded to the Ottawa-Carleton Detention Centre, where he remained until March. The charges of pointing and discharging a firearm were eventually dropped, with Ratte pleading guilty to the others. In November 1991, he was sentenced to seven months in jail.
Thankfully, no one was hurt during the standoff. Kristin Ferguson, who was 20 at the time and worked with Seguin’s daughter at the Steak N’ Burger restaurant at the St. Laurent shopping mall, remarked after the incident that as disturbing as it was, it served as an important reminder. “It made the whole point of Christmas a bit clearer. Instead of thinking about our presents, we talked about what the family must be going through.”
She feels the same way today. “For us, it was very dramatic, and our Christmas was very different. We have our Christmas traditions and we weren’t able to fulfil them that year. But for them it was a difficult time. Their lives came crumbling down. I thought that then, and as I was trying to explain the incident to my son today, I thought of her and how she’s doing.”