Was no one at fault in Onslow fire hall shooting?

There’s nothing wrong with shoot first, ask questions later? Seriously? No wonder the RCMP’S head-scratching insistence they wouldn’t change a thing about how two of their members opened fire on an unarmed emergency management official during the manhunt for as mass murderer makes Onslow deputy fire chief Darrell Currie’s head spin.

“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 told Saltwire’s Francis Campbell. “Wasn’t there one thing they could have done differently, anything, one simple thing?” Good question.

At the Onslow fire department on the morning of April 19, 2020, David Westlake, emergency management co-ordinator for Colchester County, happened to be standing by a parked RCMP cruiser occupied by Const. Dave Gagnon. Westlake was wearing a reflective vest.

That’s when two other RCMP constables, Terry Brown and Dave Melanson, pulled up.

They knew the killer was dressed like a Mountie, wearing a reflective vest. They knew he was driving a replica RCMP cruiser. They knew he had killed more than a dozen people and was out to kill more.

So, when they saw Westlake in his reflective vest by an RCMP cruiser, they fired five rifle rounds at him.

Brown and Melanson were convinced Westlake was their man. Except, of course, he wasn’t.

But according to the two Mounties’ testimony last week at the Mass Casualty Commission, knowing only what they knew at the time, they’d do it all again exactly the same way.

Their national union supported them Friday, saying the officers had “acted appropriately and in accordance with their duty to try to stop the threat.”

OK, let’s think about this for a moment.

Does that mean that anyone wearing a reflective vest and standing in reasonable proximity to an RCMP cruiser that morning was a legitimate target?

No one is questioning these officers’ sense of duty or bravery. Obviously, with a deranged killer on the loose, stopping him was paramount.

But it’s only thanks to those two officers’ poor marksmanship that David Westlake is alive today.

In the heat of the moment, with the stakes — and stress — as high as they were, mistakes can happen.

And I’m sure we all agree that shooting and killing an unarmed emergency management official would have been a mistake of tragic proportions.

If that’s all true, and clearly it is, then why can’t the Mounties admit that the possibility of such an error — and the fact it very nearly happened — leads inevitably to the conclusion that, just perhaps, alternate actions by the officers might have reduced the chances of it happening?

Or that it would be a worthwhile exercise to try to identify and evaluate said other (clearly preferred) options, then train their officers to use them when necessary.

Not according to the national police force. Which is ludicrous. An obvious question is why didn’t the officers try to first communicate with Westlake?

There are discrepancies in testimony about whether the officers shouted to Westlake before opening fire.

Brown said he did. Currie doesn’t buy it.

“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,” the deputy fire chief says. “So, it seems pretty clear to me, in my opinion, that they basically stopped the (unmarked police) car and just opened fire.”

I don’t know what was yelled or not yelled that day.

I do know that before shooting someone, you should try to make sure you’re shooting the right person.

Reflective vests aren’t an exceptionally rare garment, especially around a firehall and during a manhunt for a killer. RCMP cruisers would also not be an unusual sight in such circumstances.

Given what the officers knew, naturally they would have suspected Westlake was their man. But it was far from a slam dunk, meaning they had to also be aware of the danger of a friendly fire incident.

If RCMP protocol for such incidents was followed to the letter, then there’s a problem with RCMP protocol.

You can’t fix mistakes you don’t admit exist.

Currie and other members of the fire department, who hid inside while the shooting was going on, have testified they suffered enduring trauma as a result of what happened.

It’s astounding that the first apology they say they received from the Mounties came at the commission’s hearing last week.