Onslow firefighter: RCMP admit no mistakes
The deputy fire chief who was in the Onslow fire hall when RCMP members outside unleashed five rifle shots says the public inquiry is not fulfilling its mandate.
“If you never made any mistakes, then there is nothing to correct or change or make better,” Darrell Currie said Monday.
“Every one of them (RCMP members) said the same thing, they wouldn’t change a thing, and in the words of Brian Sauve, it was a textbook response.”
Currie was referring to the first seven of nine RCMP officers to testify at the Mass Casualty Commission and comments made by Sauve, president of the National Police Federation union that represents RCMP members.
The commission is committed to answer “the questions about what happened and why, and delivering recommendations to make communities safer,” chief commissioner J. Michael Macdonald said in February to begin the public inquiry.
Macdonald made it clear that the inquiry didn’t intend to lay blame but to provide recommendations to prevent a recurrence of the mass shootings that left 22 Nova Scotians dead in April 2020.
‘A FARCE’
Currie said the inquiry is “mostly just a farce” that is failing its mandate.
“I don’t see how any changes are going to be made if we’re not ever getting to the bottom of what the problems are,” said Currie, who has not yet missed a day of the live proceedings.
“It was nice to see some witnesses on Thursday, because that to me is how this should be taking place, the crossexamination, conflicting stories, cops throwing each other under the bus. There’s nothing adversarial, we’re not looking for that, we’re looking for answers.”
Currie had testified in April at the inquiry, along with Onslow Fire Chief Greg Muise, saying they had suffered
enduring trauma from the shooting at the fire hall.
“We stood in that room for 57, 58 minutes, still not knowing what was going on outside,” Muise testified. “It was just like we were hostages. Nobody told us anything.”
Both men testified that the trauma turned their lives upside down and described an inability to sleep and ongoing difficulty concentrating on even mundane activities.
On Thursday, RCMP constables Terry Brown and Dave Melanson testified that they were certain they were firing at Gabriel Wortman when they discharged five rifle shots toward the fire hall on the morning of April 19, 2020.
The RCMP members told the public inquiry that with what they knew at the time, they would not and should not have done anything differently.
“We came across a person who looked identical to the description we had, the guy was wearing a reflective vest, standing next to a police car,” Brown, a 13-year RCMP veteran, told commission lawyer Jamie Van Wart.
“With all those things on that day, the way they happened, I don’t think I would have done anything different,” said Melanson, an eight-year RCMP member. “It’s a great benefit to go back and say if you knew this, if you knew that, I didn’t have that benefit, I had a fraction of a second.”
CHIEF: NOBODY HEARD WARNING
Choking up, Melanson continued: “On that day, I gave my all.”
The officers were supported by the National Police Federation.
Sauve said in a statement that Thursday’s testimony regarding the fire hall events “clearly demonstrates that members validly believed that the individual outside the fire hall, wearing a reflective vest and standing beside a marked police vehicle, was the perpetrator” and “they acted appropriately and in accordance with their duty to try to stop the threat.”
On the morning of April 19, 2020, Brown and Melanson misidentified David Westlake, the emergency management co-ordinator for Colchester County, who was wearing a reflective vest and standing by an RCMP cruiser occupied by Const. Dave Gagnon, as the gunman who had already killed 19 people.
Currie said the accounts from Brown and Melanson don’t line up with other eyewitness testimony.
Brown testified he shouted at the person in the reflective vest to raise his arms, but the man ducked behind the police car and then ran across to the fire hall.
“Nobody heard Terry Brown yell, police, show your hands or put your hands up, not even Melanson, who was standing beside him,” Currie said.
“Westlake never heard it, Gagnon never heard anything, Jerome Breau, who was parked in his electric car only a couple of feet away from them never seen them or heard them yell anything, so it seems pretty clear to me, in my opinion, that they basically stopped the (unmarked police) car and just opened fire.”
Two of the five rifle blasts damaged the fire hall bay doors and struck a fire truck inside and could have injured or killed someone inside, and Currie said in earlier testimony that he thought he would die that morning.
Currie said the police officers never identified or acknowledged themselves moments later when they came into the fire hall.
“They never acknowledged themselves when they banged on the side door,” he said.
Brown testified Thursday that while he was walking the perimeter of the fire hall outside, he did not bang on the side door.
“All of those things combined lead me to believe that they are just protecting their jobs by telling the story that they wanted to tell and they are the police, so people believe them, that’s the frustrating part.”
Currie said the SIRT (serious incident response team) report exonerated Brown and Melanson, that “they basically told the same story, which I don’t believe to be true.”
Currie said RCMP spoke to Westlake briefly inside the fire hall but did not check to see if there was anyone else in the building.
NO WRONDOING CLAIMS ‘FRUSTRATING’
Currie, Muise and Richard Ellison, a Portapique resident whose son, Corrie, was one of 13 victims killed in that community on the evening of April 18, 2020, hid in the back of the fire hall for nearly an hour, believing they were under attack from the mass killer.
“That’s what they say, they didn’t do anything wrong and they would do the exact same thing if they had to do it tomorrow, which is just frustrating,” Currie said. “Wasn’t there one thing they could have done differently, anything, one simple thing.”
Constables Stuart Beselt, the shift supervisor, Adam Merchant and Aaron Patton, the first three RCMP members to respond to the multiple murders in Portapique, testified at the inquiry on March 28 that they would not have done anything differently in retrospect.
On April 14, RCMP constables Ben Macleod Craig Hubley testified at the public inquiry about the takedown of the killer at the Enfield Big Stop on the morning of April 19, 2020, saying they followed procedure and wouldn’t have done things differently.
“With the fire department, we do deep sessions on every major call we get, we document and we go through it and that’s what we try to do, what could we do better,” Currie said. “We never had a call, ever, that there wasn’t at least one thing, usually many things, that we could have done differently, better, and some things that we did exceptionally well.
“The cops don’t seem to do that.”