‘OUR HEARTS ARE BROKEN’
Two police officers were among four people killed in an early-morning shooting in a quiet Fredericton neighbourhood on Friday.
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Const. Robb Costello would often tell his spouse that no matter what happened to him on the job, he would always come home.
On Friday, the Fredericton officer didn’t return.
Instead, police showed up at Jackie McLean’s home to tell her the 45-year-old was among four people killed in a shooting that took place in a quiet residential neighbourhood.
“This is the first day he did not come back home,” McLean, Costello’s commonlaw
partner said. “I am having a really hard time envisioning my life without him.”
Fredericton Police Chief Leanne Fitch identified the dead officers — a seasoned warhorse and a recent recruit — as Lawrence Robb Costello, 45, a husband with four children, and Sara Mae Burns, 43, a wife with three children. They were the first officers to arrive at the scene of the early-morning shooting and were shot as they rushed to two people lying on the ground.
“This is the worst moment for any chief of police in any police agency to have to deliver this news,” Fitch said at a news conference Friday afternoon.
The shooting left two more people dead — both civilians, a man and woman — but police have not released their identities. The accused gunman, a 48-year-old Fredericton man, is in hospital. He has not been identified.
The National Post has learned seven other people were wounded.
Costello, a detective known as Robb, worked on all manner of cases — missing persons, robberies, street crimes, extortion, sex crimes — as a member of Fredericton police’s major crimes unit and while seconded to the RCMP’s internet child exploitation unit. He was a 20-year veteran of the force.