(Halifax) This is one of the most puzzling aspects of the Nova Scotia massacre, which killed 22 people two years ago: after killing 13 people in Portapique on the evening of April 18, 2020, the killer decided to rest for the night.
Posted at 4:13 p.m.
The astonishing move may have basically allowed him to avoid capture for much of Sunday morning, as there is evidence to suggest police then assumed the killer had taken his own life the day before. somewhere in the woods in Portapique.
“The problem with this kind of assumption is that it can have a real impact on how (the police) proceed from that moment,” said Michael Scott, a lawyer whose firm represents the families. of 14 of the 22 victims of the killing.
The commission of inquiry into the killing is expected to release a document on Wednesday describing what happened immediately after the killer, Gabriel Wortman, left the village of Portapique, around 10:45 p.m. Saturday evening, driving a replica of a a Royal Canadian Mounted Police patrol vehicle disguised as a policeman.
According to search warrant requests already released, the killer drove undetected for 24 kilometers and parked his vehicle just after 11 p.m. behind a welding shop in Debert, where he spent the night in the fake patrol car .
The following day, he killed nine others as he led officers on a 100 kilometer chase, which ended when he was shot by an RCMP officer who spotted him doing the full, this time of a stolen vehicle, at a gas station north of Halifax.
The commission’s mandate includes determining why it took the police 13 hours to arrest the killer. However, according to a thesis mentioned, the police investigating the shooting in Portapique would have wrongly concluded that the killing had ended Saturday evening with the suicide of the madman.
The first RCMP officer to arrive on the scene, Constable Stuart Beselt, told a commission prosecutor that he believed the killer had committed suicide after officers from the RCMP’s Emergency Response Team called out his name through a megaphone.
Constable Beselt said he then heard gunshots as he and other officers were sent home on the night of April 19. “I said to myself: he shot himself in the woods. »
Constable Beselt was not the only police officer to be mistaken about the fate of the killer that night. His colleague Aaron Patton said during an interview with an RCMP officer on April 23, 2020: “we were 100% sure that it was him who committed suicide in the woods”.
patrol vehicles
In addition to speculation by officers on the ground, there is evidence to suggest that the RCMP erroneously concluded that the fake patrol car witnesses saw in Portapique was indeed one of three ex-police cars later found in the night, two of which were set on fire.
Because the RCMP had learned that the killer had purchased three old patrol cars in recent years, and the three vehicles were therefore counted on Sunday night. However, it seems that the RCMP was not aware that the killer had purchased a fourth ex-police vehicle.
According to police documents, the killer left Debert at dawn on Sunday at 5:43 a.m. and traveled 60 miles to Wentworth, where he killed two men and a woman, at 6:29 a.m. Around the same time, the killer’s common-law wife, Lisa Banfield, emerged from hiding in Portapique and alerted police that Wortman was driving a replica patrol car, a photo of which she shared with investigators.
The RCMP then quickly issued a notice to all police officers in Nova Scotia to be on the lookout for the shooter and his vehicle. At 8:02 a.m., the RCMP released a brief statement on Twitter publicly confirming for the first time that they were looking for “an active shooter.” However, a tweet about the suspect’s vehicle and RCMP uniform was not posted until 10:17 a.m., nearly 12 hours after Portapique officers and 911 operators were made aware of the existence. of the vehicle in the colors of the RCMP.
“By connecting the dots of all these assumptions, all these small errors, even if they are understandable, we begin to have an idea of how this guy was able to walk, without being hassled, all over the province for 13 hours. “, argues M.and Scott.