O'Brien was off shift on the night of April 18, 2020, and had consumed four to five drinks of rum at home between 6 p.m. and 10 p.m. AT, at which point the first 911 calls came in, he said Tuesday. 

"I have a very strong sense of responsibility for the members that I'm responsible to. I lost a member in 2017 who worked for me. My nightmare that night was I was going to lose another," O'Brien told the inquiry tasked with examining the 13-hour rampage that left 22 people dead, injured others and devastated many in Nova Scotia. 

In the first hour of the police response on April 18, 2020, O'Brien — whose Monday-to-Friday job was overseeing the daily operations of the RCMP in Colchester County — communicated by radio from home with the team of three officers on foot in a subdivision where police would later discover 13 people had been killed. 

O'Brien advised them to "be very, very cautious, do not be aggressive" and not to approach a burning building unless someone was at risk.

Twenty-two people died on April 18 and 19, 2020. Top row from left: Gina Goulet, Dawn Gulenchyn, Jolene Oliver, Frank Gulenchyn, Sean McLeod, Alanna Jenkins. Second row: John Zahl, Lisa McCully, Joey Webber, Heidi Stevenson, Heather O'Brien and Jamie Blair. Third row from top: Kristen Beaton, Lillian Campbell, Joanne Thomas, Peter Bond, Tom Bagley and Greg Blair. Bottom row: Emily Tuck, Joy Bond, Corrie Ellison and Aaron Tuck. (CBC)

He testified the RCMP code of conduct prohibits anyone who's been drinking from working and though he felt he didn't violate that, he was aware it could "bring into question the integrity of any decision-making" and hurt the confidence other officers and the public had in him.

Because of the optics, he advised his boss, Staff Sgt. Al Carroll, who went into work as a result. 

O'Brien testified he got his wife to drive him to his detachment to pick up a portable radio. 

"I was not intoxicated, but that's not the point. The point is there's always going to be a perception if people are aware you've been drinking … that you're compromised," he said.

O'Brien is one of two senior RCMP officers who was approved to answer questions in recorded sessions, as opposed to in front of a roomful of participants and lawyers. 

Lawyers representing families could submit questions in advance, but some boycotted proceedings in Truro, N.S., because they were not permitted to directly question O'Brien and Staff Sgt. Brian Rehill, who testified Monday. Neither session was live streamed as has been the case with every other witness, but the commission said it will post the video. 

Anna Mancini, counsel for the Mass Casualty Commission, questions former RCMP sergeant Andy O'Brien on May 31, 2022, as part of the inquiry into the N.S. mass shooting of 2020. (CBC)

Anna Mancini, the lawyer asking questions for the Mass Casualty Commission, pointed out some of O'Brien's directions to front-line officers appeared "at odds or contradictory" with his claim that he would not make decisions about the police response. 

She specifically asked about O'Brien's comment to "hold off" when Const. Chris Grund asked about sending a second team into the subdivision where they knew four children were hiding in a home. 

O'Brien testified he only got on the radio after waiting "what seemed to me to be a lifetime" for someone else to respond, and did so after 15 seconds because he was fearful the officer would take it upon himself to go in.

He also characterized his response to "hold off" as pointing out established RCMP protocol not to send two teams of officers into an area with an active shooter situation as opposed to making an order. 

"It wasn't a decision, it was 'this is our training' ... We don't want anybody else in the crossfire," he said. 

In that instance, O'Brien said the officers in charge — Rehill, Carroll and Staff Sgt. Steve Halliday — were very busy and he felt "compelled" to help as it was "a case of obviously none of them heard the transmission or were in a position to respond to it." 

O'Brien said he did not believe alcohol affected his judgment. 

3 weeks of testimony from commanders 

This is the third week senior officers have testified about the decisions they made and information they processed during the shooting rampage. 

O'Brien, like Carroll and Rehill, said he had no memory of hearing Const. Vicki Colford communicate on the radio that she was hearing about a back way out of Portapique. At the time, the RCMP were trying to seal off the community and only later realized the gunman drove out on a private road along a blueberry field that did not appear to be an exit on maps, they testified.

O'Brien also said he did not remember if Colford brought this up when he spoke to her on the phone about 20 minutes after her radio broadcast. 

Throughout his testimony, O'Brien said he could not remember specific details or conversations, including the person he spoke with in some cases.

For example, O'Brien said he knew he consulted someone by phone before giving Grund and Const. Bill Neil the go-ahead to walk into Portapique to try to rescue the children. 

Rehill was overseeing the response for the first three hours from the RCMP's communications centre. Early on April 19, Staff Sgt. Jeff West took over as critical incident commander and worked with a team at the fire hall in Great Village, N.S. 

On Monday, Rehill testified he called O'Brien around 3 a.m. to relay West's wishes that due to things "getting awfully confusing," he and O'Brien needed to "step back" and let the command team "run the show."

Challenges remembering details

Mancini asked specifically about an exchange that occurred about an hour after that conversation, when West asked O'Brien over radio to stop telling officers stationed around Portapique they could leave checkpoints if other officers were there.

The direction to try to relieve those officers would've come from someone else, O'Brien testified.

"I'm not sure how that evolved. I believe that was instructions given to me by one manager and then a rethink or correction by another manager," he said. 

"It's also possible I misinterpreted the conversation of whoever I was speaking with, I don't know. I have no memory or notes." 

Mancini, as other lawyers for the commission have, asked if there was confusion about who was issuing commands to front-line officers on the radio. 

O'Brien responded by describing an analogy of creating a "beast" of a structure of more than 100 people in a few hours "with a business plan no one has seen before you started the task" to try to stop a threat. 

RCMP vehicles continued to block the crime scene in Portapique, N.S. on April 26, 2020. The morning of April 19, O'Brien was responsible for ensuring an officer was guarding each of the crime scenes that had been discovered. (Olivier Lefebvre/CBC)

He said any time there is a command post, the volume of information being processed is overwhelming.

"It's impossible to create something in that breadth, and in that time span, with that lack of understanding what the challenges are, without having some crossed wires," he said, adding it's difficult to relate the scale and complexity of the response to civilians. 

O'Brien went off shift to sleep for a few hours overnight and reported to the command post the following morning, around the time 911 calls started coming in about new shootings. 

As the tactical team rushed to try to track down the gunman, O'Brien and Carroll drove to Portapique to ensure officers were still watching the crime scenes from the night before. 

Secured scenes in Portapique

It would still be hours before police discovered the full extent of the carnage. Officers did not locate the bodies of five people in two homes on Cobequid Court until much later, and hours after family members called looking for information. 

Had he known there might be more victims, finding them would have been the top priority, O'Brien testified. But he said he never received any information from the RCMP's dispatch centre about people who hadn't been accounted for. 

One officer, Const. Nick Dorrington, previously told the inquiry that O'Brien sent him out to drive around Portapique and look for bodies on lawns. 

When asked about Dorrington's comments, O'Brien said he only recalled trying to offer a break to an officer guarding a gruesome crime scene, and knew the officer would only leave to take a drive if he was given another task.

He said it never occurred to him there could be other scenes. 

"It was such a unique situation. I'd never been to a crime scene that extended past what we were aware of," he said. 

"I wish we had known. I wish we had found them soon. I can't imagine what the families went through." 

'No magic solution'

Mancini asked about suggestions for improving future responses, but O'Brien said there is "no magic solution."

"It's such a multi-legged process that there are going to be gaps. There's lots of things about this incident that I wish had been different," he said. 

"But we can't change those. We did our best. There were parts of this process that I really wish we could've done better, but we did the best with what we had at the time."

A lawyer for families of victims killed in the Nova Scotia mass shooting says an 18-hour delay in finding five bodies of those murdered is a sign of "deficient" policing.

A study released Thursday by the public inquiry into the shooting quotes RCMP supervisor Sgt. Andy O'Brien stating "it did not occur" to him to drive to scenes other than locations where bodies were known to be and where fires had occurred in Portapique, N.S.

The public inquiry has said 13 of 22 victims were killed by the gunman in Portapique between about 10 p.m. and about 10:45 p.m. AT on April 18, 2020, when the killer escaped through a back road in his replica police car.

However, the study says it wasn't until 4:46 p.m. on April 19, 2020, that the bodies of Peter and Joy Bond and — a few minutes later — those of Aaron Tuck, Jolene Oliver and Emily Tuck were found on a small road called Cobequid Court at the southern end of the community.

Josh Bryson, a lawyer for the Bond and Tuck families, said the RCMP fell short by failing to order a house-to-house canvassing of the homes in the small community sooner than they did, adding that police left desperate family members wondering about their loved ones' fates.

"It's deficient, it's not appropriate," Bryson said Friday in an interview. "It's not acceptable to us. You had members on hand .... There were no searches [in the morning].

"They didn't seem to consider that there might have been residents in homes who needed medical attention."

On the morning of April 19, 2020, emergency response team members were gradually evacuating the community. However, after a call came in at 9:30 a.m. of another shooting near Wentworth, N.S., those officers rapidly left Portapique in pursuit of the gunman. The inquiry heard Thursday that district commander Staff Sgt. Al Carroll and Sgt. O'Brien took charge of the Portapique area at this time, with constables under their command. Carroll left mid-morning, leaving O'Brien in charge.

Bryson said Bond family members had reached out to police via 911 seeking information the morning of April 19, but the requests didn't appear to make their way to Carroll.

Carroll testified on Thursday he didn't recall receiving "any messaging" from police dispatchers about these calls. He also said that he didn't expect that the houses would be searched, as it was up to the major crime investigators to take the next steps.

Const. Nick Dorrington told inquiry investigators he was ordered to look for "fatalities on front lawns" on April 19. The study says GPS records indicate his car stopped in front of the Bond house at 10:26 a.m. Dorrington's car was at the residence for about 30 seconds, but he didn't enter the home.

Twenty-two people died on April 18 and 19, 2020. Top row from left: Gina Goulet, Dawn Gulenchyn, Jolene Oliver, Frank Gulenchyn, Sean McLeod, Alanna Jenkins. Second row: John Zahl, Lisa McCully, Joey Webber, Heidi Stevenson, Heather O'Brien and Jamie Blair. Third row from top: Kristen Beaton, Lillian Campbell, Joanne Thomas, Peter Bond, Tom Bagley and Greg Blair. Bottom row: Emily Tuck, Joy Bond, Corrie Ellison and Aaron Tuck. (CBC)

Bryson said he's left to wonder why the officer didn't approach the house. "Mr. Bond was in the front door deceased, the screen door was off its hinges, television was on, the lights were on. For someone to sit in the driveway, it's extremely upsetting and concerning," he said.

"There's no evidence to suggest they [the victims] were still alive but it's very distressing to know your loved ones remained in the area with first responders in the vicinity, but they aren't being discovered," the lawyer added.

The theme of failures of communication has been prominent over the past week at the public inquiry hearings.

Carroll testified on Thursday that he didn't learn until 3:30 a.m. on April 19 that there were two key eyewitnesses who saw the killer and his replica patrol car at about 10:15 p.m. the previous night.

Bryson said the RCMP's communications shortcomings have emerged as a key revelation of the inquiry to date.

"A lot of this we can remedy, from my point of view, with better systems to convey information, which would be minimal in cost," he said.

Burrill said O'Brien's comment sounded more like providing directions to the front-line officers, to which Carroll replied that he perceived O'Brien as being concerned about safety and was pointing out danger.

But he did concede "it may have been a breach of command structure."

Carroll also acknowledged he "overstepped" his own role when he responded on the radio to his son's request for backup on a road west of Portapique's main entrance. But he said he would have "jumped in" if any officer was not getting a response on the radio and the fact that the constable was his son "had no relevance."

O'Brien and Rehill are both scheduled to testify next week, but will only be questioned by commission counsel next week in pre-taped video interviews, with the chance for other lawyers to submit questions.

'I should have asked more questions'

Later, lawyers questioned Carroll about his conversation with one of the officers who opened fire at the Onslow Belmont Fire Brigade. Const. Terry Brown called Carroll afterward to say he fired his service weapon.

Carroll testified he thought it was just the one accidental shot and asked if the team could continue searching for the gunman. He later learned that Brown and his partner, Const. Dave Melanson, both shot their carbines in the direction of a civilian outside the hall.

He said he stood by that decision to keep the team on the road given they were looking "for a madman out there shooting people." But he testified had he known what happened at the fire hall, he would have gone there personally to check in right away.  

"It falls on me. I should have asked more questions. I was … just so content that nobody was injured and I didn't ask the questions I should have asked and that falls on me," Carroll said.

Family members protest

As Carroll began testifying virtually, about 20 people gathered to protest outside the Truro hotel where the inquiry was being held.

Family members and friends of the victims, as well as supporters of the families, are upset about the accommodations being made for Carroll and two other key RCMP officers involved in the shooting response.

People gather signs for a protest in Truro outside the inquiry into the N.S. mass shooting of 2020 on May 26, 2022. Victims' families say they are upset with the commission's decision to limit how key RCMP members are testifying. (Haley Ryan/CBC)

"If the officers that were in charge those two days can't get on the stand and defend their decisions that they made, then there's something wrong with this whole process," Charlene Bagley, whose father Tom Bagley was killed in the mass shooting, told reporters.

"If they are not going to allow them to get up and speak the only truth that there is, then why are we taking part in this? Why has $26.5 million dollars been put towards this, for causing more trauma to the public and to the families?"

The group quietly marched on the sidewalk throughout the morning, holding signs that said "the truth hurts" and "don't hide behind the badge" as drivers honked in support.

The commission has said the accommodations are to help people with health or privacy concerns give their best evidence in a "trauma-informed" way.

Charlene Bagley, daughter of one of the victims of the 2020 mass shooting in Nova Scotia, speaks with reporters in Truro outside the inquiry into the shootings on May 26, 2022. (Haley Ryan/CBC)

But Bagley said it feels like the commission is not really thinking of the trauma of the other people involved — just the officers. 

"That's all it seems to be. So their trauma seems to trump everyone else's. Not OK with that."

Some signs also called on Nova Scotia's premier to weigh in, reading "Houston we have a problem." 

Premier Tim Houston told reporters in New Glasgow on Thursday that he listens carefully whenever the victims' families raise issues about the inquiry.

When asked about whether Houston could work with the federal government to ensure these concerns are being met, the premier said that the inquiry is an independent process and "we have to be respectful of that."

However, Houston said he's optimistic the commission is also receiving the message and will take the steps necessary to ease the concerns from families, Nova Scotians and politicians "all equally."

"Hopefully, we can find a way to get this back on track. The inquiry is really important that we get to the answers, so we just need everyone to have the confidence that everyone has the same goal," Houston said.

Retired staff sergeants Jeff West and Kevin Surette testified Wednesday before the Mass Casualty Commission leading the inquiry into the April 2020 mass shooting, when a gunman killed 22 people in the province.

The pair were asked Wednesday about their thoughts on using roadblocks around 10:20 a.m. on April 19, after the gunman had killed strangers he encountered as well as acquaintances.

Surette said he pushed to not block roads like Highway 102, the main artery through Truro, even though that was one choke point between the northern and southern parts of the province.

He said such a roadblock could easily have generated a line of cars two kilometres long. Given that they knew the gunman was killing "at random," Surette said didn't want to expose anyone to further danger.

"We knew that there was likely going to be a shootout at some point," Surette said Wednesday. 

"We didn't want a shootout to happen in front of a lineup of civilians parked on the 102, probably getting out of their cars and looking around to see what's going on."

He said the "lesser of two evils" was the plan they decided on: placing officers at strategic points along the highways to watch intersections.

Both West and Surette said the 13-hour critical incident that evolved into a manhunt for a mobile shooter was a situation they reacted to based on their decades of experience — but it was not something the RCMP had ever trained them for.

RCMP investigators search for evidence at the location where Const. Heidi Stevenson was killed along the highway in Shubenacadie, N.S. on Thursday, April 23, 2020. (Andrew Vaughan/The Canadian Press)

The scenario that Surette feared — citizens pulling over to ask questions at a shooting scene — happened later that morning around 10:50 a.m. in Shubenacadie, where RCMP Const. Heidi Stevenson was killed by the gunman after a gunfight between the two. Joey Webber, a man who pulled over to try and help as he passed by, was also killed.

Inquiry documents show multiple people in nearby cars saw the gunman's shootout with Stevenson on a highway interchange, drove directly by while he was still there, or were roaming around on foot and approached the RCMP officers that were later guarding the scene.

West and Surette were the two on-call critical incident commanders (CIC) the night the shootings began on April 18. West was reached first by Steve Halliday, a now-retired staff sergeant, who called him at 10:42 p.m. to tell him there was a likely active shooter situation in Portapique.

West let Surette know he was being called in to take charge of the incident and bring in resources like the emergency response team, and arrived at the makeshift command post in Great Village near Portapique after 1 a.m. Surette, who was based in Yarmouth, made his way to Great Village a few hours later to offer West support.

They also addressed gaps in information, including that they weren't aware until eight hours after the fact that a witness to the gunman had been shot but survived.

Key information not passed on from early hours

The inquiry has heard that Portapique residents Andrew and Kate MacDonald were shot at by the gunman from his mock cruiser, but managed to drive away quickly and encountered the first RCMP officers who responded to the community just before 10:30 p.m. on April 18.

The MacDonalds were on the phone with 911 when the shooting happened, and Kate eventually was transferred to risk manager Staff Sgt. Brian Rehill. She told him the gunman was in a police car that had stripes.

Both MacDonalds spoke with officers at the scene, and Kate told Const. Vicki Colford about a back road out of the community that came out near an old church on Highway 2. Colford radioed that information out at 10:48 p.m. 

Police didn't interview Andrew again until after 5 a.m. on the 19th, and West said he finally learned about his information around 6:30 a.m. on April 19 when Halliday told him. 

Halliday testified Tuesday that he also hadn't known about Andrew's existence until around 3:30 a.m. in a debrief with the first team of officers who'd met the MacDonalds in Portapique.

Commissioners ask how to fill gap

West said he never was told about the Colford broadcast about a secondary exit, and couldn't "speculate" on why he wasn't told about Andrew's evidence until hours later.

"It's a bit surprising that you would arrive and take command three hours in without the information about Andrew MacDonald reaching you, and certainly that it doesn't reach you until the following morning," Commissioner Kim Stanton said to West on Wednesday.

"What is the structural gap that would ensure that that kind of information is captured and shared?"

West said he doesn't have a "simple answer," as he wasn't able to read any reports on the drive to Great Village and relied on conversations with Halliday to fill him in. When West got to the command post, he said there was no time to review 911 transcripts or look through earlier radio logs.

West suggested someone in a crime analyst role scanning through the huge volume of information and picking out the vital pieces would have been helpful, rather than "relying on word of mouth." But, he said there are no officers assigned to that role within critical incidents he's aware of.

"Clearly there's a gap there," said Surette.

Issues with helicopter communication

West and Surette talked about issues they had in trying to get through on the police radio channels to share important updates throughout the incident. West said poor radio coverage is a reality across rural parts of the country, and Surette said too many people talking over one another has been a problem he's seen for years.

This technical issue also appeared when Surette said he was trying to direct the provincial Department of Natural Resources that took to the air after 6 a.m. on April 19. Because the chopper didn't have an encrypted police channel, Surette was communicating to the pilot on another channel through a portable radio and there were several times he either couldn't get through or there was a major delay.

While Surette said he was successful in directing the helicopter to Glenholme where the gunman had visited a couple's home, it arrived too late to spot him. At one point, Surette was trying to get the chopper to crime scenes on Plains Road and wasn't aware it had stopped to refuel.

The setup was "not ideal," he said.

Alert not in 'toolbox'

West and Surette said Wednesday they did not consider sending a public emergency alert about the shootings through the province's Emergency Management Office (EMO), which at the time was the only agency with the Alert Ready system in the province.

Surette said he'd gotten an alert about COVID-19 on his cellphone just weeks beforehand, but didn't think the alert capability had reached into policing.

The inquiry heard last week that at the time of the shooting, alerts could be sent to all Nova Scotia cellphones on 4G networks, as well as TV and radio stations. EMO staff made presentations on the alert system to RCMP multiple times in the years before the tragedy, and offered them the ability to send alerts on their own, but that was turned down.

"It was not a tool in our toolbox at that time," West said.

West also said he was not aware of exactly what media releases or public communications were going out about the incident, since he'd delegated that task to Halliday.

The RCMP and Halifax Regional Police can now issue their own alerts.

The inquiry's public hearings will resume next Wednesday.

Steve Halliday, a retired staff sergeant, testified Tuesday at the inquiry examining the shootings that he was able to quickly discount that theory, and instead believed the vehicle connected to the gunman was in fact a decommissioned or old RCMP car.

Halliday is one of a number of officers who have testified at the inquiry that they didn't imagine during the early hours of the rampage that the vehicle being driven by Gabriel Wortman, who killed 22 people on April 18-19, 2020, was nearly identical to a real police cruiser.

He also outlined what he knew of the emergency alert system, and what information led him and other officers to conclude the gunman remained in the community of Portapique, N.S., hours after the shooting began, when in fact he had escaped and would resume killing people the next morning.

A new document released Tuesday by the commission conducting the inquiry details the RCMP command structure and decisions over the 13 hours the gunman was active, and lays out what each officer did and when.

At 10:35 p.m. on April 18, risk manager Staff Sgt. Brian Rehill called Halliday at home to tell him about a likely active shooter situation in Portapique, where multiple people had died, fires were set around the community and a police car was possibly involved.

As the risk manager on duty at the Operational Communications Centre in Bible Hill, N.S., Rehill had been in charge of the unfolding incident from the moment victim Jamie Blair called 911 at 10:01 p.m. She said her husband, Greg, had been shot by Wortman, a neighbour. She also said there had been an "RCMP car" in their yard.

She herself was then shot and killed by the gunman.

Halliday said Tuesday that Rehill told him Dave Lilly, a now-retired RCMP sergeant, had been brought up as being possibly connected since he owned property near Portapique.

"My first thought was 'uh-oh,'" Halliday told the inquiry, adding he was worried Lilly had his marked cruiser with him in Portapique and had done something "heinous" in the community.

"I was really concerned that this could be the case," Halliday said.

According to the inquiry documents, at 10:55 p.m. Halliday called Lilly directly. Lilly was at his cottage, which wasn't in Portapique, and it became clear he wasn't involved in the active shooter situation.

     A photo of the gunman's decommissioned 2017 Ford Taurus that he made into a replica cruiser. (Mass Casualty Commission)

Halliday said once he realized Lilly wasn't involved, the idea of the marked cruiser morphed to a decommissioned or older model of police car. He said from his experience, when people are caught up in traumatic situations their information can be "wrongly worded or misinterpreted."

"That factored into my thought process at that time," Halliday said.

When asked further about this issue by lawyers representing victims' families, Halliday said the idea of  a decommissioned car with some old reflective markings left behind made the most sense. To conclude that someone had created a mock RCMP car, which the gunman actually used, "wasn't realistic to me."

The inquiry has also heard that the first three officers who searched for the gunman in Portapique didn't imagine they were looking for someone in a fully marked police car that looked nearly identical to their own.

Halliday retired in January 2021 after 30 years with the Mounties in various roles. He had been an instructor for courses like immediate action rapid deployment, and had been in "numerous" critical incidents over the years through his work as a crisis negotiator.

He did not have critical incident commander training.

Halliday brings in other officers

After the first call from Rehill, Halliday took over and brought in the rest of the command team. He called Staff Sgt. Jeff West at 10:42 p.m. to bring him in as the critical incident commander and get him to mobilize his team "as quickly as he could."

At that time, he would have passed on the information to West that a marked police car was possibly involved, Halliday said Tuesday. Halliday also called Staff Sgt. Addie MacCallum and told him he'd need him to handle containment and identify a perimeter.

MacCallum and Staff Sgt. Al Carroll were first to arrive at Bible Hill detachment and began to "prepare and muster resources" for the incident, including assessing maps of the Portapique area, constructing a profile of the gunman and helping call out for other resources.

Just after 11:30 p.m., Halliday joined the two other officers at Bible Hill and decided to have Rehill continue controlling resources on the ground as "ad hoc incident commander."

After spending the first few hours at the Bible Hill detachment, Halliday, MacCallum and Carroll moved to the Great Village command post to join West and other officers. Halliday arrived just after 2 a.m.

The 'blueberry field road' north of Cobequid Court in Portapique, looking north toward Brown Loop. (Mass Casualty Commission )

Andrew MacDonald, a Portapique resident who had been shot and injured by the gunman, was interviewed by Const. Jeff MacFarlane around 5 a.m. He told the officer the gunman's car had "coloured" vinyl decals like a police cruiser, and there was "potentially" another way to get out of Portapique through a path that came out near a church on Highway 2. 

MacDonald's account was passed on to Halliday by Cpl. Gerard Rose-Berthiaume about an hour later. According Halliday's notes, Rose-Berthiaume told him the gunman had driven a Ford Taurus back into Portapique after shooting MacDonald near the entrance to the community. There is no mention of MacDonald's description of police decals on the vehicle.

The notes also say Rose-Berthiaume indicated "there was no other way out" of the community. That information later proved wrong, as the gunman likely used an old back road to leave Portapique. When asked about that Tuesday, Halliday said he could only form opinions based on multiple details he knew at the time.

Halliday said by that point of the morning, and after learning early on that Lilly wasn't involved, the marked police car information had long been "dispelled." 

He said police knew about three Ford Taurus cars the gunman owned, all decommissioned police vehicles. Officers believed two were burning in Portapique while a third was in Dartmouth, N.S., which meant all were accounted for.

Police only later realized there was a fourth, which the gunman was driving. It was unregistered and made to look like an RCMP cruiser.

The remains of the gunman's Portapique property and burnt shell of a car, taken in May 2020. (Steve Lawrence/CBC)

Halliday said the main impression he took from Rose-Berthiaume was that the gunman "was trapped" in Portapique as long as he was still driving a car — "so that to me was important information, because it enhanced, you know, my belief that the suspect was probably still down in that area."

Other cues that the gunman was still in the area had come in throughout the night from the initial team on the ground as well as the emergency response team, Halliday said. Those included what sounded like gunshots into the early hours of April 19 and flashlights in the woods of both Portapique and the nearby community of Five Houses.

Halliday became emotional when talking about what those first three officers — constables Stuart Beselt, Aaron Patton and Adam Merchant — dealt with on the ground.

He said they were some of the "bravest people" he'd ever met, who risked their lives to help a community in a situation their immediate action rapid deployment training wouldn't have prepared them to address.

That training is based upon finding and stopping an active shooter in a well-lit, clearly defined area, Halliday said, and came out of the 1999 Columbine High School shooting. Portapique was more like a "bush-tracking event," he said, where members on the ground didn't even have night-vision goggles.

"When you have an event like this that no one has ever been faced with before, that there has to be opportunities to look and assess what we can improve on, what we can learn, to provide our members with the best opportunity for success," Halliday said.

Rehill issued first containment directions

The commission has suggested the shooter left Portapique not long after the shootings via a private back road — called blueberry field road by locals — then continued on Brown Loop Road to Highway 2 between 10:41 p.m. and 10:45 p.m.

Between 10:44 to 10:46 p.m., Rehill issued the first directions to set up a containment perimeter beyond the intersection of Portapique Beach Road and Highway 2, including roadblocks in the surrounding area.

However, the inquiry has already heard it wasn't until midnight that officers were stationed on Highway 2 east of Portapique Beach Road. In the first hour and a half of the police response, two containment points were set up further west of Portapique Beach Road. 

A pair of officers moved to Brown Loop, to which the blueberry field road connects, at 5 a.m.

Command believed back road impassable by car

Halliday spoke Tuesday about the containment in those first few hours. He said judging from maps they examined at the Bible Hill detachment and Carroll's "local knowledge," there was only one way in or out of Portapique by car — the main entrance of Portapique Beach Road.

"I was satisfied that based on the information I had at that time that our containment was set up in such a manner that anybody who was escaping, you know, in a vehicle, would be intercepted," Halliday said.

However, once he had access to better satellite maps at the command post in Great Village, Halliday said around 4:30 a.m. he noticed a line along the blueberry field that seemed to connect to Brown Loop Road.

Halliday recalled he brought this up to Carroll and MacCallum as a possible exit route. All three agreed "no one could get out there in a car," although perhaps it could be travelled on by foot or in an ATV.

Just to "err on the side of caution," Halliday said they decided to move up the roadblock of two members further east up to the Brown Loop Road.

"To be safe rather than sorry … let's move somebody up," Halliday told the inquiry.

Halliday not told of Colford broadcast

Sandra McCulloch of Patterson Law, whose firm represents many victims' families, asked Halliday about whether he'd heard a broadcast about a possible side road around 10:48 p.m. from Const. Vicki Colford, who'd just interviewed Kate MacDonald.

"We're being told there's a road, kind of a road that someone could come out, before here," Colford radioed.

Halliday said he was still making calls at home and not on the radio by that point, and said no one ever relayed that information to him at the time.

When McCulloch asked whether this detail would have impacted how he assessed the maps of Portapique he was looking at while at the Bible Hill detachment, Halliday said "certainly any information would have come under consideration."

The inquiry has already heard that MacCallum had issues trying to bring up the force's Pictometry program, which is based on satellite imaging, in the first hour of the mass shooting so the officers in Bible Hill turned to Google Maps standard view and paper maps.

McCulloch pointed to an inquiry report showing a view of Portapique with the Pictometry system, which Halliday said looked quite similar to the satellite mapping he looked at hours later. When asked if this would have been helpful to have in the first hours when containment was set up, Halliday agreed.

Alert not in 'playbook'

The inquiry documents show that Halliday spoke with a staff member at the provincial Emergency Management Office just after 6 a.m. about setting up the Onslow fire hall as a comfort centre for Portapique evacuees.

Halliday said Tuesday that he didn't discuss the possibility of sending an emergency alert through EMO, which at that time was the only agency with the Alert Ready system in the province.

The inquiry heard last week that at the time of the shooting, alerts could be sent to all Nova Scotia cell phones on 4G networks, as well as TV and radio stations. EMO staff made presentations on the alert system to RCMP multiple times in the years before the tragedy, and offered them the ability to send alerts on their own, but that was turned down.

Halliday said Tuesday he was "unfamiliar" with the alert system being used for policing in the province.

"It simply wasn't in our playbook," he said.

The RCMP and Halifax Regional Police can now issue their own alerts.

Roadblocks brought up

The inquiry also heard about Halliday's radio broadcast just before 11 a.m. on April 19, directing another member to look at closing Highway 2 southbound. This would have come right after Const. Heidi Stevenson was shot and killed by the gunman after he crashed his cruiser into hers in Shubenacadie.

Before that, Halliday said there had been some discussions around roadblocks or whether they should create checkpoints strategically along certain areas.

However, he said the decision was made not to do this as it "posed increased risk to the public" by creating a bigger target for the gunman where people were stuck sitting in a line of cars.

After Stevenson was shot and the net was "tightening down" on the gunman's location, Halliday said roadblocks seemed appropriate because they finally knew where he was within a smaller area.

Tara Miller, who represents relatives of victims Aaron Tuck and Kristen Beaton, asked Halliday about why exactly more roadblocks weren't set up in the Truro area on April 19 to prevent the gunman moving from the northern part of Nova Scotia to the south.

She noted by the time police knew the gunman was active again around 9:30 a.m. on April 19, when the call came in about victim Lillian Campbell in Wentworth, the gunman's partner Lisa Banfield had told police she was worried he would head to her sister's home in Dartmouth to hurt her.

Halliday said within a short time after Campbell's death, the gunman knocked on the door of a couple's home in nearby Glenholme and multiple RCMP officers as well as the emergency response team surrounded that area.

"It was my belief that individual was going to be dealt with at that home," Halliday said, so that was the focus.

But Miller suggested it is the job of police to look at the "global picture," and keep in mind all information about where the gunman might head next — to which Halliday agreed.

Two more RCMP commanding officers involved in the mass shooting response will testify before the inquiry on Wednesday.

Const. Vicki Colford, who has since retired, answered questions in a sworn affidavit entered as a Mass Casualty Commission exhibit earlier this month. Her statement is shedding light on how police missed a key piece of information about a possible escape route the gunman is believed to have used to evade police stationed less than a kilometre away.

On April 18, 2020, Colford was the fourth RCMP officer to arrive the night a gunman killed 13 neighbours and torched several homes. Family members of people killed the following morning have questioned why police did not do more to seal off the community and why it took so long to realize the gunman could have driven out on a private road bordering a blueberry field.

The public inquiry examining the tragedy went over surveillance footage, spoke to witnesses and determined the gunman most likely drove along the field and out onto Highway 2 a few hundred metres from the main entrance between 10:41 p.m. and 10:45 p.m. AT.

By the time Colford pulled up around 10:32 p.m., two officers had gone into the community on foot. After learning a third would join them, she decided to check vehicles at the entrance and ensure Andrew and Katie MacDonald, who had been shot at, got medical attention.

At 10:48 p.m., Colford said on her police radio: "If you guys want to have a look at the map, we're being told there's a road, kind of a road that someone could come out, before here. Ah, if they know the roads well."

But at least three senior officers overseeing the response testified they never heard her transmission and Colford herself said she didn't realize she made it.

'No recollection' of radio transmission

It wasn't until reviewing inquiry documents that she learned of it and had "no recollection" of being told about a back exit or if the woman she spoke with identified the road connected to it, Colford wrote in an affidavit.

The MacDonalds left in separate ambulances and Colford stayed with Katie MacDonald for about 45 minutes.

"Katie MacDonald was very upset and not speaking clearly. I was trying to keep her calm while monitoring our surroundings for the threat," she said.

   An aerial map of Portapique from May 2020 with street names added by the Mass Casualty Commission. (Mass Casualty Commission)

Her focus was on "trying to keep my head on a swivel to watch and be aware" amid the nearby fires, shots fired and the active shooter on the loose, Colford stated.

She said her assumption — based on reading the transcript — was that she made the broadcast to pass new information to the risk manager overseeing the response and anyone else that was part of it.

She said most of her communications that night happened over the radio, but she did also speak with senior officers by phone.

Worried about ambush, screening vehicles

Another Portapique resident, Harlan Rushton, told the commission he spoke to a female Mountie on his way out, telling her something along the lines of, "You know there's another way out," and the officer agreed.

Colford told the commission she didn't have any memory of that exchange but checked about 10 vehicles looking for signs of the gunman, weapons, gas cans and anything suspicious.

   An RCMP officer talks with a local resident before escorting them home at a roadblock in Portapique on April 22, 2020. The night of April 18, Const. Vicki Colford was stationed at the entrance to Portapique Beach Road. (Andrew Vaughan/The Canadian Press)

Her goal, she explained, was to get people out quickly so the exchanges only lasted a few seconds. She said she scanned the back of trucks and hatchbacks and got at least one driver to pop their trunk.

"I had no idea where the perpetrator was… The possibility of ambush was always on my mind," she wrote.

"Every time a vehicle was leaving, it diverted my attention from my surroundings and I didn't want anyone to get shot at while stopped."

Not required to testify 

Lawyers representing families of victims had requested that Colford appear as a witness and though the commissioners initially said they would subpoena her, they later granted Colford an accommodation that she could provide a written statement instead of oral testimony.

The National Police Federation had made the request and submitted confidential personal information that the commissioners considered.

Lawyers representing participants were able to submit the questions they had for Colford, including requests to clarify statements she previously made to the RCMP during an interview a few days after the shootings. She answered 63 questions posed by the commission.

Felt like 'sitting duck'

Colford and Cpl. Natasha Jamieson spent most of the night stationed near the mailboxes at the top of Portapique Road. While positioned around a colleague's SUV, they tried to provide each other with cover — Colford with a shotgun and Jamieson with her service pistol.

Neither officer had completed carbine training.

"I really felt very much like a sitting duck in that I couldn't see much beyond my immediate area due to lack of street lights," Colford told the commission.

Colford had previously provided back up to a colleague — Const. Nick Dorrington — who pulled the gunman over for speeding in February 2020 but had no other prior interactions with him and didn't know the community that well.

Dorrington is scheduled to testify at the inquiry on Monday.

An RCMP constable testified Monday that in February 2020 he swore at Gabriel Wortman to get back in his vehicle after pulling him over for speeding and the 51-year-old immediately presented as a "clear threat" by walking back toward the cruiser in Portapique, N.S. 

"The way he approached was very direct, purposeful. He looked infuriated, I had no idea as to who this individual was and why he'd be conducting himself in such a manner," Const. Nick Dorrington told a public inquiry examining the shooting and arson rampage that injured some and left 22 people dead, including a pregnant woman and an RCMP officer.

The exchange "de-escalated quickly," however, once Wortman was back in his vehicle and they had a brief conversation, Dorrington testified.

"He proceeded to tell me that he felt that he was being targeted," and became compliant after Dorrington explained that the stop was in no way prompted by an earlier altercation Wortman had with Halifax Regional Police over a parking dispute, the officer said. 

The gunman then brought up his affection for Ford Tauruses, that he had a number of them and collected police paraphernalia, but Dorrington said the minute-long conversation did not prompt him to have any concerns about public safety. 

• CBC's full coverage of the inquiry into the Nova Scotia mass casualty

Dorrington, who spent 17 years in the army before joining the RCMP in 2015, was stationed in Colchester County and was one of the officers who responded to the mass shooting overnight on April 18 and into April 19. That weekend he was on call after working a day shift. 

During Monday's testimony, he was critical of one of his RCMP supervisor's role in the response and said he didn't agree with the decision to only send one team into the section of Portapique where people were killed. He also felt he should have been deployed to chase down the gunman the following morning. 

Const. Nick Dorrington said he took a photo of the gunman's drivers licence and his speed radar as evidence in the event the driver contested a ticket in court. (CBC Photo Illustration)

After learning he'd pulled over the suspect a few months previously, Dorrington shared photos he took of the gunman's licence and the back of the decommissioned Ford Taurus he'd been driving. 

He said the vehicle he'd stopped had faded reflective strips from its time as an RCMP car and that it had a small Canadian flag on the rear by the trunk. 

But, similarly to what several other Mounties have previously told the Mass Casualty Commission, while envisioning what the suspect was driving, he was never picturing a fully marked cruiser like the one the gunman put together and drove during the rampage. 

Frustrated with positioning

Between midnight and 5 a.m., Dorrington and another officer were stationed on Highway 2 screening vehicles four kilometres east of crime scenes in Portapique.

Dorrington testified he "had a challenge" with Sgt. Andy O'Brien's direction to set up there because he felt it was "in contradiction" to his training related to tracking down active shooters.

The public inquiry previously heard that the senior officers overseeing the response were concerned about the possibility of sending more than one team into the "hot zone" where the shooter was last seen due to the possible safety risk of officers being involved in crossfire or a "blue-on-blue" situation where they mistook each other for the suspect. 

The commanders did not have GPS coordinates for general duty constables on the ground. 

But Dorrington said that night he felt the approach should have been to use "as many teams as are necessary to move in locate and neutralize the threat" and agreed with commission counsel Roger Burrill's suggestion that it caused him frustration. 

Issues with supervisor's role

During a behind-the-scenes interview with commission staff, Dorrington was critical of O'Brien's involvement, given that he wasn't on duty and was speaking on the radio from his home.

On Monday, he said that while he has since walked back criticism related to O'Brien's training, he maintained that his involvement made it challenging to know who was in charge. 

"To be receiving direction from Sgt. O'Brien, although I'm sure well intentioned, was creating … additional airtime on the radio, which is problematic. And it created, in my mind, confusion for the chain of command," Dorrington said.

O'Brien and Dorrington worked closely together on Sunday in Portapique. Both remained in the community keeping an eye on the crime scenes. 

Once calls started coming in about new shootings in the Wentworth area, Dorrington said he was "not allowed" to leave to help with the manhunt, despite making his case to O'Brien.

"I felt that given my skill set with previous military training in active theatre [along] with RCMP training, coupled with the fact that I had an unmarked vehicle, that I'd be perhaps the best positioned to leave my current location," he said. 

At one point, Commissioner Leanne Fitch asked Dorrington if he had ever taken or instructed courses in overseeing a critical incident response. He said he had not. 

Dorrington said he was a sergeant in the military so had similar duties to O'Brien's and was in charge of a unit in that capacity. 

Passing along sighting of gunman Sunday morning

While in Portapique on April 19, Dorrington advised his wife to shelter in their basement. He said information gathered from the gunman's spouse, Lisa Banfield, suggested he had a hit list and he was worried that he could be viewed as a target given he was the last Mountie to interact with the gunman.

The officers who interviewed Banfield in the back of an ambulance previously testified at the inquiry and said that while she told them her sister in Dartmouth could be at risk, they did not describe a hit list. 

Twenty-two people died on April 18 and 19, 2020. Top row from left: Gina Goulet, Dawn Gulenchyn, Jolene Oliver, Frank Gulenchyn, Sean McLeod, Alanna Jenkins. Second row: John Zahl, Lisa McCully, Joey Webber, Heidi Stevenson, Heather O'Brien and Jamie Blair. Third row from top: Kristen Beaton, Lillian Campbell, Joanne Thomas, Peter Bond, Tom Bagley and Greg Blair. Bottom row: Emily Tuck, Joy Bond, Corrie Ellison and Aaron Tuck. (CBC)

After learning of the situation, Dorrington's wife called a friend who happened to notice a marked RCMP cruiser driving south toward the Halifax area on a secondary highway. Dorrington tried to figure out if an actual cruiser was in the area and then radioed to his colleagues after the possible sighting. 

There was a lot of radio chatter at the time and Dorrington testified he felt there "was a significant delay" in the distribution of his message, which he felt was "pertinent and of high priority." 

Felt equipment was insufficient 

Equipment and training was another area with which Dorrington took issue. 

He said given that the RCMP predominantly polices rural parts of Canada, more active shooter training should be done outside with more of it focused on night-time scenarios. 

Night vision goggles or hand-held devices to identify heat sources would also be helpful, he said, so that general duty officers wouldn't have to wait for specialized resources like the emergency response team during a crisis. 

Lawyer Sandra McCulloch, who represents many family members of people who were killed, asked Dorrington about comments he'd previously made to the inquiry about having had requests related to officer safety denied by a detachment commander prior to April 2020. 

Those requests included a chair to restrain people who could be a physical risk to themselves or others at the detachment, Dorrington said. 

He also requested rotatable spotlights for vehicles that he said would help illuminate long driveways and alleys better than the fixed lights on the lightbars on cruisers that only move when a vehicle does. 

A request for push bars on patrol vehicles — which he said would be cheaper than repairing damage to vehicles — was denied about a week before two of the detachment's cruisers were written off after one backed into another, he said.

Tammy Oliver-McCurdie lost her younger sister, Jolene Oliver, in last April's mass shooting in Portapique, N.S., and her worst fear remains that the 39-year-old woman, her husband, Aaron Tuck, 45, and their 17-year-old daughter, Emily, lay injured for hours.

The family of three were among the 13 people killed on April 18 in their tiny subdivision in rural Nova Scotia, about 130 kilometres north of Halifax. A gunman went on to kill nine more people the following morning in what became one of the worst mass killings in Canadian history.

A police officer shot and killed the man responsible at a gas station in Enfield, N.S., on Sunday, April 19 at 11:26 a.m., after the gunman travelled about 195 kilometres.

During a teleconference on July 3 with the Oliver family, who live in Alberta, the RCMP said they didn't discover the couple and their daughter until 5 p.m. on April 19 — 19 hours after investigators believe they were killed.

By that point, family members had been frantically calling and looking for information for hours, pleading with the RCMP to send an officer to check on their loved ones.

Police assured the Oliver family they did not suffer, though the final reports from the Nova Scotia medical examiner about how exactly they died are still not complete.

"Always what goes through your mind is how long did they lay there for alive?" Oliver-McCurdie said in an interview with CBC News. "The best story is yes, they went fast. But what if they didn't?"

CBC's The Fifth Estate investigated and found that while the RCMP did tell some residents to leave their homes late on April 18, they left others in the community to sleep through the night, unaware a neighbour had gone on a shooting spree.

Families have questions about delays

The Oliver family is among several that lost loved ones in the rampage who have raised questions about how the RCMP responded and why it took so long to confirm the deaths.

Oliver-McCurdie said she still doesn't understand the delay, given that the subdivision is small and police arrived Saturday night. The Oliver-Tuck home was located about two kilometres from the entrance to the community.

"I would hope that police would check the house to see if everyone was OK, especially if they're missing the shooter. So a lot of questions and a lot of anger coming out of that piece for me and my family," she said.

"I'm upset over it. It makes no sense when it comes to a public safety standpoint, it makes no sense."

At the July 3 meeting, RCMP investigators said officers in Portapique were still in the process of clearing homes on the Sunday afternoon, which is why it took so long to get to Oliver and Tuck's house. They also said at the meeting that on the day after the shooting, they were concerned about properly identifying victims and not releasing incorrect information.

As far as the Oliver family knows, no one in the house called 911. 

WATCH | Thirteen Deadly Hours: The Nova Scotia Shooting:

"She made a lot of art and a wrote a lot of poems," Oliver-McCurdie said. "She's a really unique kid and a really unique outlook. She was a lot of fun."

For now, as the Oliver family wait for answers, they continue to grieve. In Alberta, they planted three oak trees from Nova Scotia's Colchester County in memory of the branch of their family they've lost.

'We don't have any answers'

As details of the rampage hit the news in bits and pieces, Oliver-McCurdie began to worry. Her sister wasn't answering the phone.

Her niece's social media accounts had gone silent.

Watching the news break from nearly 5,000 kilometres away, she felt helpless. She thought of buying a plane ticket.

She prayed that they had run into the woods for cover. Or maybe they were injured in hospital.

More than 10 agonizing hours later, a call from the RCMP confirmed her worst fears. 

The waiting was torture. Knowing the truth has left her with a grief so suffocating she finds it difficult to breathe, she said.

The bodies of her family members will remain inside the home until Tuesday. Police have told her little else. 

"We don't have any answers on what happened. I have a lot of questions."

Oliver-McCurdie has been left to wrestle with her questions as she plans two funerals. Because of the pandemic, family members on opposite sides of the country will not be able to grieve together.

Oliver-McCurdie said the family is taking solace in all the messages of support they have received from people in Portapique, from Canadians across the country, and from other grieving families. 

The tragedy should serve as a reminder to hold loved ones close, she said. 

She had a falling out with her sister years ago and regrets the time they lost. 

"By the grace of God, I was able to mend that in the last few months. I just wish I called her more, now knowing that I had such limited time.

"If there are people out there, if there's anybody in their life that they need to mend a fence with, do it sooner than later because you never know. You never know."

The Mass Casualty Commission leading the inquiry has now laid out the full timeline of what it believes happened across April 18 and 19, 2020, based on interviews, 911 calls, police radio logs and other evidence.

But lawyers for the victims' families said Wednesday that written accounts are simply not enough, because they need the ability to ask followup questions and clarify important details to make sure the inquiry's working with the best evidence.

"It leaves the inference, rightly or wrongly, that there is an avoidance to call a witness," said Tara Miller, who represents family members of Aaron Tuck and Kristen Beaton, who were killed by the gunman.

"That necessary questions are not being asked, and that information is not being disclosed and difficult truths may not be uncovered."

Twenty-two people died on April 18 and 19, 2020. Top row from left: Gina Goulet, Dawn Gulenchyn, Jolene Oliver, Frank Gulenchyn, Sean McLeod, Alanna Jenkins. Second row: John Zahl, Lisa McCully, Joey Webber, Heidi Stevenson, Heather O'Brien and Jamie Blair. Third row from top: Kristen Beaton, Lillian Campbell, Joanne Thomas, Peter Bond, Tom Bagley and Greg Blair. Bottom row: Emily Tuck, Joy Bond, Corrie Ellison and Aaron Tuck. (CBC)

The commission had asked to hear from participants about gaps and errors in the record they've noticed so far, or comment on emerging themes.

In the past five weeks of the inquiry, there have been eight witnesses called in person. Two more officers testified Thursday, bringing the total to 10.

Miller also said there's an impression the inquiry is running out of time to hear from witnesses, as the spring schedule leaves little time for testimony, which is "unsettling for our client and further assists in the erosion of confidence in the process."

The commission's interim report is due May 1, but Miller said it's clear they cannot yet make any factual findings of what happened over the two days of the massacre "as this information is still not complete."

Joshua Bryson, who represents the family of victims Joy and Peter Bond, said getting to hear earlier this week directly from two firefighters and a victim's father about being at the Onslow fire hall when police mistakenly thought they spotted the gunman and opened fire was "moving and very informative."

Greg Muise, Onslow fire chief, Darrell Currie, deputy chief, and Portapique, N.S., resident Richard Ellison, left to right, field questions about the incident at the Onslow Belmont Fire Brigade Hall at the Mass Casualty Commission inquiry in Halifax on Monday. (Andrew Vaughan/Canadian Press)

Bryson said based on that testimony, he heard details he "certainly didn't glean" from any of the previous documents or interviews provided by the commission.

While the commission has a trauma-informed approach that aims to make witnesses comfortable when sharing their information, Bryson said this mandate should not "blunt" the inquiry's search for answers.

"There is a great concern by my clients that the trauma-informed approach will continue to be attempted … as a measure to curtail witness testimony and curtail the commission's mandate to make findings," Bryson said. 

Lawyer Sandra McCulloch, whose firm represents many victims' families, said she was especially disappointed to see the police union's recent request to have an officer give evidence by written affidavit.

McCulloch said the National Police Federation's request for the officer to use a question-and-answer document, drafted by commission lawyers, is taking a "narrow" view of testimony on specific topics that won't be able to illustrate why the officer took certain actions.

Union says other ways of testifying must come first

Brian Sauvé, president of the union, said Wednesday it is always open to having Mounties testify — when necessary.

"We should be exhausting every other available opportunity to gather that evidence," he said. 

Lawyers said they are still unclear on when multiple people they have requested might testify, including key witnesses such as the gunman's partner, Lisa Banfield.

The inquiry will take a break from public hearings next week to honour the second anniversary of the massacre. It will resume on April 25.

Const. Terry Brown said there was no doubt in his mind a man in a safety vest running behind an RCMP cruiser towards the fire hall in Onslow, N.S., in the midst of the frenzied hunt for a mass shooter was the suspect he'd heard the gunman's spouse describe hours earlier. 

The RCMP officer recounted the "split-second" decision he and his partner made before discharging their carbines in the direction of what turned out to be a civilian on April 19, 2020, in a lengthy interview with the public inquiry examining the response to the mass shooting that claimed the lives of 22 people, including a pregnant woman and a Mountie. 

"I was sure that he was — if he got away, he was going to go kill more people, because there was no doubt in my mind … that that's the guy we were looking for," Brown told investigators with the Mass Casualty Commission on March 10, 2022, according to new details released by the inquiry on Monday.

Brown said he was not aware the fire hall was being used as a comfort centre for people told to leave their homes in Portapique, N.S., the tiny community 28 kilometres away where 13 people had been murdered the night before. He also told the inquiry he did not know that a fellow Mountie from Pictou County had been sent there to provide security that morning.

The gunman was driving a replica RCMP cruiser and was disguised as a Mountie. Brown said his partner, Const. Dave Melanson, tried to radio colleagues after they slammed on the brakes of their unmarked Nissan Altima less than 100 metres from the fire hall to alert them they saw an RCMP cruiser and who they thought was Gabriel Wortman, the man wanted for murder. 

Two RCMP officers started firing in the direction of the Onslow Belmont Fire Brigade hall. (CBC)

Brown said he didn't even notice a second person at the hall, the actual RCMP officer sitting in his patrol car, and had his carbine pointed at another man in the parking lot who was wearing a vest. 

"And he's looking at me and then he ducks behind the car, and I was sure he was getting a gun," Brown told the inquiry. "We're yelling, like, 'Show us your hands.' And this is happening very, very quickly."

He said he started firing when the man started running toward the building and in retrospect, the "tunnel vision" of concentration he experienced meant that he didn't hear his own rifle go off or realize that his partner also fired. 

The man wearing the high-visibility yellow and orange safety vest, David Westlake, was the emergency management co-ordinator for Colchester County and was at the fire hall to help connect displaced people with support provided by the Red Cross. 

Surveillance footage captured outside the fire hall shows Const. Terry Brown and Const. Dave Melanson leaving the parking lot less than five minutes after they started firing. (Onslow Belmont Fire Brigade surveillance cameras)

Westlake, who spoke to commission investigators last June, has a different recollection of the same moments, when he said he was walking behind the Pictou County cruiser and a grey vehicle screeched to a halt across the parking lot. 

"I never heard 'police' or 'show your hands.' I heard 'get down.' And I am adamant to this day this is what I heard," Westlake said in his interview.

"I remember a shot that sounded like a sonic boom and then another one that was really loud and I'm moving at this time." 

Brown fired four rounds and Melanson fired one, inquiry documents show. 

Const. Dave Gagnon was stationed outside the fire hall to provide security on April 19, 2020. He got out of his cruiser and put his hands up at 10:21 a.m. after two fellow RCMP officers started firing toward the hall. (Onslow Belmont Fire Brigade surveillance cameras)

Westlake said he ran inside yelling "shots fired," and ducked down as he entered the fire hall to pick up the portable radio he had dropped. It would be hours before he realized he was the Mounties' target. 

Const. Dave Gagnon, the officer from Pictou County who was sitting in his parked vehicle, tried to radio back to the officers. He also yelled at them and they finally dropped their guns, he told Nova Scotia's Serious Incident Response Team, the police watchdog agency that investigated the shooting at the fire hall. It found all three officers experienced problems getting on their radios due to getting "bonged out," a problem that results from many people trying to talk at once. 

On Monday, the public inquiry heard audio that Gagnon was able to transmit. 

"Hey! Hey! Hey! Hey.... Who are you shooting at? It's Gagnon," he said. 

4 men hid for an hour

In the hall, two firefighters had been assisting Richard Ellison, a man from Portapique whose son was killed the previous evening. 

Greg Muise, the fire chief, and Darrell Currie, the deputy chief, previously told CBC they hid in terror behind tables for an hour after hearing the shots outside their hall, thinking the actual gunman was outside and having heard someone banging on one of the hall's doors. 

                 Sources: Mass Casualty Commission / Twitter (CBC)

Muise and Currie told CBC at the beginning of public hearings that the shooting has caused lasting trauma and they remain frustrated that no one from the RCMP has ever apologized or explained why shots were fired. 

Muise, Currie and Ellison testified together in a panel on Monday in Halifax and told the inquiry's commissioners they feared for their lives. 

"I remember thinking, how am I going to die? Am I going to bleed out on the floor of this comfort centre? Am I going to see this person? Is he going to shoot through the wall? It was pretty horrific," Currie said. 

'Is everyone OK?'

Westlake was the only one of the four to speak to a Mountie in the minutes after the shooting. He said Gagnon and the man he later learned was Melanson stepped inside the hall briefly. Surveillance video shows they were inside the hall for 30 and 17 seconds respectively. 

"I heard somebody come in and say, 'Is everybody OK? Is anybody hurt,' or something along that line. And I responded back, 'No. All four of us are OK,'" Westlake recounted. 

Gagnon, in his Serious Incident Response Team interview later on April 19, 2020, said after checking the group was OK he told the other two officers, "Everybody's good in there."

Westlake and the firefighters all said no one explained who shot at them or why.

On Monday in Halifax, Muise said they felt like "hostages." He said things would have been different if the Mounties had identified themselves and relayed the group was safe.

"You know, 'We're RCMP, we're here, we're sorry, what's going on in there, we'll be back to talk to you.' Nothing. We had nothing, just like we were shoved under a rug somewhere and left," he said. 

Surveillance video from the Onslow Belmont Fire Brigade hall on April 19, 2020, shows Brown at the rear of the building. The time code on the surveillance video is 10 minutes fast. (Mass Casualty Commission)

Brown said he circled the building, unsure if the actual gunman was on the property, and learned after that everyone inside was fine. 

"I was upset. I wasn't crying or upset in that way. I was just upset because … I knew that that's a big deal. We just discharged our weapons. I've never discharged my weapon while on duty other than to put down an animal," he said in his interview with the commission. 

Surveillance video from the hall shows Brown and Melanson were at the hall for less than five minutes. They left to continue their pursuit of the gunman.

Meanwhile, the four men in the hall continued hiding and learned that the RCMP had tweeted that Wortman, who by that point had killed 19 people, had been spotted in the Onslow-Belmont area at the same time the shots had erupted. 

At one point, Westlake looked outside and didn't see Gagnon's car — which the officer had moved away from the front of the building — so he told the group they should move between the fire trucks so they'd be better protected, he explained to the commission investigators. They didn't emerge from the hall for about an hour and after calling people to find out what was happening. 

$40K in damage

Brown and Melanson left behind nearly $40,000 worth of damage, including to one of the fire trucks, a monument and an electronic sign at the end of the parking lot near to where they fired.

"You could see where the bullets they came through that door just like it wasn't even there. If they would have hit one of us, it would've been the end of us. Big time," Ellison testified Monday. 

Westlake told the commission's investigators that in the weeks that followed the incident, he went to the RCMP to demand they cover the costs of damage to the fire hall and continued to work with them, assisting with the search for a missing child, and made inquiries to check in on how Gagnon was doing. 

"I fought very hard with the RCMP to pay the bills, to get rid of the scars at the fire hall because at lot of people were driving by and looking at it," Westlake said. 

 Greg Muise, Onslow fire chief, Darrell Currie, deputy chief and Portapique resident Richard Ellison, left to right, field questions about the incident at the Onslow Belmont Fire Brigade Hall at the Mass Casualty Commission inquiry on April 11, 2022. (Andrew Vaughan/Canadian Press)

But he told the inquiry that even as he outwardly made jokes about the experience at the fire hall and tried to process it with humour, it was taking its toll.

"For 30 years I witnessed a lot of trauma, but … this was more than what I could ever expect. And it took me a long time to say it's not my fault this occurred. And I don't really care if anybody views me as broken….. I don't want this to happen to anybody else," Westlake said. 

He said he struggled to understand — knowing that the officers would've been aiming at his centre of mass — why the two officers chose to employ lethal force based on the visual of something as common as a safety vest. 

"I've never had malice to the two individuals that pulled the trigger. I still don't to this day. I want to meet them. I want to ask them how they missed," he said. 

No 'blue on blue'

Brown never disputed that he was aiming to stop Westlake and took issue with the how the fire hall incident has been considered a "blue on blue" situation, where a police officer shot at one of his own. 

He said his target was always the man in the safety vest and had he wanted to shoot the cruiser, he would have hit it. He said the man was an "identical match" to the description of the gunman given to him earlier by Lisa Banfield, the shooter's spouse, and from another RCMP officer, Const. Rodney Peterson.

Banfield had given Brown the information while she was in the back of an ambulance that morning after she emerged from the woods in Portapique after escaping the gunman the night before. Peterson passed the gunman on the road in Glenholme, N.S., and relayed a description of him back to his colleagues.

In his inquiry interview, Brown said having GPS on RCMP officers' portable radios activated, enabling the risk manager in telecoms to monitor locations, "would have changed a lot of things."

'Desperately wanted to get that guy'

Brown's interview with the public inquiry, a transcript of which was released, was the first in-depth description of what prompted he and Melanson to start firing. He previously provided a statement to the police watchdog agency that investigated and cleared Brown and Melanson of any criminal wrongdoing, finding they had reasonable grounds to believe they were firing at the killer.

Brown and his partner Melanson had been working since 3 a.m., called in to help with the investigation into what was happening in Portapique, N.S. 

Hours after interviewing Banfield, the pair were in Great Village when calls came in about a shooting in Wentworth, N.S., so they put on their hardbody armour and rushed to their cars, racing toward reported sightings with their carbines at their side. 

"I remember thinking, like, we're going to be in a position where we might be able to get this guy," Brown told the commission. "We desperately wanted to get that guy."

The fire hall and a truck were damaged during the shooting. Repairing the damage cost $39,000 and the fire brigade says the RCMP paid the bill. (Submitted by Sharon McLellan)

The fire hall incident wasn't the first time they came across a cruiser and wondered if it was the suspect. As they headed toward a sighting in Glenholme, they spotted the marked vehicle belonging to Const. Rodney MacDonald and stopped 50 metres away, radioing to confirm who it was. 

In the hour that followed the fire hall shooting, the pair came upon the scene where Const. Heidi Stevenson was killed, passed the EHS station where unbeknownst to them a bleeding Const. Chad Morrison was waiting for help, and came upon the distraught daughter of Gina Goulet, the last person murdered.

Brown stressed to inquiry investigators that April 19 was not his first high-stress active shooter situation. He was on the ground in Moncton, N.B., in 2014 when three officers were shot and killed by a gunman and had seen many difficult situations in his 13 years with the force. 

"At no point did I feel that I wasn't in control of what I was doing, that the situation was too big for me. I felt, for the most part prepared, as prepared as you could be….. I wasn't running around that day recklessly, you know?" he said. 

"I wanted to stop that guy from killing people that day. It was as simple as that."

On April 19, 2020, amid the manhunt for a shooter disguised as a Mountie who ended up killing 22 people in rural Nova Scotia, two RCMP officers pulled over at the Onslow Belmont Fire Brigade hall and started firing.

They had mistaken a municipal official in a safety vest standing beside an actual RCMP cruiser for their suspect, causing nearly $40,000 worth of damage to the rural station.

But the impact went far beyond a shattered sign and punctured siding.

Muise and Currie, the chief and deputy chief, assumed the actual gunman was outside and spent an hour with two other men huddled behind tables, fearing for their lives.

It wasn't until later that they learned the shooter had driven by their hall not long before the Mounties stopped there and that he was long gone when the gunfire erupted. The officers left without talking to the firefighters.   

Two RCMP officers started firing in the direction of the Onslow Belmont Fire Brigade hall on April 19, 2020, around 10:21 a.m. (CBC)

In the nearly two years since, they have struggled with the lasting trauma. 

"It took part of my life.... I lost part of my life," Muise said Tuesday during public hearings for the mass shooting inquiry.

"The fire hall was like a second home to me.... I'm nervous every time I go there, not sure, not knowing what's going to happen next. It's a challenge." 

Muise and Currie attended the first day of the public proceedings for the commission in their uniforms. They were not swayed by the commissioners' assurances during opening remarks that the inquiry would be transparent and thorough.

"Those are words, and we've heard words for 15 months," Currie said in an interview.

"They post updates on the website, but nothing substantial has come out of that. So without seeing any actions, which we haven't seen at this point, I don't believe that anything is going to change."

Though they once hoped a public inquiry would shed light on their experience and how it could be prevented, the firefighters' confidence waned as more than a year passed without hearing from the Mass Casualty Commission.

They said they finally spoke to inquiry investigators earlier this month after their lawyers pushed the commission to reach out and after inquiry staff had already prepared a summary document detailing what happened at the fire hall.

But they said the interview didn't dig into what actually happened to them that spring morning — when the RCMP asked them to open the hall as a comfort centre for people displaced by the violence in Portapique, N.S., — and focused only on how it impacted them. 

Without that, "the context of the supports required and long term effects will not hold as much relevance and be difficult to understand," Currie said in a letter to the commission he sent last week. 

The Mass Casualty Commission's mandate includes looking at the events of April 18-19, 2020, including the police response, as well as how the people most affected were treated afterward. 

Muise and Currie are participants in the inquiry and represented by Patterson Law. The firm also represents 23 others, including people closely affected and more than half of the families who lost loved ones.

Like some family members who say they have lost faith in the process, the pair say they're not holding their breath that the joint federal-provincial inquiry will lead to lasting change. 

"I've been disappointed all along in the way the commission has handled the proceedings so far. So I'm coming into this with low expectations," said Currie. 

     A municipal official who was outside the fire hall ran inside when gunfire started, as captured by security footage in the fire hall. (Onslow Belmont Fire Brigade surveillance cameras)

Barbara McLean, the commission's investigations director, previously told CBC News the start of the hearings does not mark the end of her team's investigation and that it will continue until the final report in November. 

On Tuesday, the commissioners said they intend to call witnesses when needed during public hearings to clarify any controversial information and have incorporated interviews with about 150 people into documents that will be introduced.

One document will focus on the Onslow fire hall incident.

But Muise said he doesn't understand why they were contacted so late in the inquiry process and he doesn't think there will be enough time to call or subpoena all the relevant people to testify. 

"I think they should have been looking at witnesses [when the inquiry's work started]. I think they waited too long to do that and now they're trying to rush it to get it done," he said. 

Deputy fire chief Darrell Currie was in the bay with the fire trucks when he heard gunfire. He looked to Twitter for information as no one came inside to explain what was going on. (Steve Lawrence/CBC)

Currie wants people to remember that the impacts of the mass shooting go beyond the losses for families of people killed and extend to those injured and deeply affected as a result of the gunman's rampage. 

"Our story is largely forgotten when the big story is told," said Currie. "We don't have a grieving process to go through, we have our own trauma to deal with.... There's pretty much an entire community that's been traumatized." 

Though he and Muise both still go to fire calls, Currie has been on leave from his day job after being diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder.

Fire Chief Greg Muise says the call to help at his own fire station ended up being the worst call he  responded to in the decades he's been a volunteer firefighter. (Steve Lawrence/CBC)

He's attended workshops and dozens of psychologist and psychiatrist appointments trying to process the experience. 

"I'm taking medication I never took before. I had trouble sleeping, concentrating, focus, depression, anxiety — all that sort of textbook PTSD-type symptoms," he said. 

"As a first responder, we go to help. We know basically what we're responding to. But this is something that just happened to us. We experienced it and it's been tough." 

A changed view of RCMP 

After the fire hall was hit with gunfire, the province's Serious Incident Response Team investigated and last winter, it cleared the two officers who fired the shots of any criminal wrongdoing, finding they had reasonable grounds to believe a man outside the hall was the killer. 

The firefighters had never heard an explanation directly from the force, let alone an apology, and never heard directly from the people who shot the hall, Muise said, adding he knows who they are and has since been on a call with one of them. 

 Greg Muise and Darrell Currie attended the opening day of the Mass Casualty Commission at the Halifax Convention Centre. (Steve Lawrence/CBC)

Muise said over four decades, he attended emergency calls alongside Mounties, but his trust eroded when police fired in his direction and neither of the officers came inside to check on them. 

"I always felt comfortable around them. We did our job and they did their job and you know, what happened that day just kind of took that away. Not sure who we can trust out there anymore," he said.

"Leaving us there in the hall for an hour. It's like a hostage situation to me."