Police faced with perfect storm in N.S. manhunt
OTTAWA • Police inexperience, pitch-black night and a chaotic crime scene with 13 bodies and multiple fires: It was a perfect storm of conditions that kept the RCMP off the trail of mass killer Gabriel Wortman for 13 hours, a former police detective says.
“This is by far the worst case I have ever heard of in Canadian history. The whole scenario: the police car, the police uniform, the indiscriminate and targeted shooting of subjects, the number of bodies, the number of crime scenes, it’s unheard of,” says David Perry, former detective sergeant for the Toronto Police and now CEO of Investigative Solutions Network. “I would not expect perfection out of the police response in a case like this because there’s nothing that can train you for something like it.”
But the police should have used an emergency alert to warn residents of the danger, said Perry, who was behind the first-ever Amber Alert in Ontario back in 2003.
In a press conference Friday, the RCMP gave the most detailed account yet of what they know happened during the murderous rampage that left 22 victims dead in Nova Scotia last weekend.
Notably, we learned that the RCMP set up and focused their investigation in a large perimeter around Portapique starting at 10:26 p.m. after they discovered 13 victims at eight locations and multiple buildings on fire.
“I’m sure everyone could imagine what that scene looked like. Multiple victims, multiple structure fires,” said RCMP Supt. Darren Campbell, adding they thought it was a “localized incident” and that the killer was in the “heavily locked down” area.
But he wasn’t. Police realized much later that Wortman had already escaped and travelled 43 kilometres north in a police uniform and an unplated mock police car to Wentworth, where he would shoot more people 12 hours later.
Did the police make a mistake when it set up a perimeter and focused its attention for so long in Portapique? Not necessarily, said Perry.
“Darkness, fires, an armed man and you don’t know where he is, it adds to the complexity level over 100 per cent. You can’t just blindly send officers running in to find the suspect. Setting up the perimeter and containment was the absolute right course at that particular time, and it’s just unfortunate that he escaped either before or some time after they set it up,” the former police officer explained.
Another likely issue was a lack of experience.
“Mass shootings just don’t happen in these (rural) areas. So the police are suddenly confronted with something they have likely never experienced in their life,” Perry said. “So the first thing you do is set up a perimeter and focus on containment, bringing in additional resources and then you start a methodical search of the area.”
One thing the RCMP did get wrong, Perry said, was how it communicated about the rampage when officers realized Wortman was still travelling around.
The force turned to Twitter to warn the public, instead of issuing a provincewide emergency alert to most electronic devices. The province’s Emergency Measures Operation contacted police several times Sunday morning to ask whether they wanted an alert issued.
Perry said the RCMP probably encountered the same issues he did back in 2003. “We put out the first Amber Alert, and guess what? There were delays in getting it out for all the same reasons... So there was a delay when it went out, and I’m certain the RCMP dealt with the same challenge here,” Perry explained.
Campbell admitted Friday he knew some Nova Scotians were angry. “We hear the families of the victims full force. They have every right to ask these questions and they have every right to be angry,” he said.