(Halifax) One of the RCMP officers who oversaw operations when the killings began in Nova Scotia in April 2020 was subsequently off work for at least 16 months, saying he had been struggling to answer questions about the decisions made that night.
Posted at 2:15 p.m.
Staff Sergeant Brian Rehill, a risk manager at the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) Operational Signals Station in Truro, told commission investigators that support from other officers has helped him since. to turn the page on these tragic events.
But at the time of his interview with prosecutors on January 15, he was still off work.
In the report of this interview, filed with the commission of inquiry, the policeman, who has 32 years of service with the RCMP, explained his decision not to quickly send a second group of police officers to assist the first three dispatched to Portapique, after the first reports of gunfire on the evening of April 18, 2020.
Lawyers for the families of the victims argued that if the RCMP had had a full complement of six officers on duty that evening, rather than the minimum four, and a system to track the movement of officers, a second team might have been able to take another route and cross paths with the killer.
Sergeant Rehill explained that he could have been the subject of criticism if he had sent a second team to the scene and these officers had then come under fire.
“I would have been like, ‘What the hell were you thinking, Rehill? Having two or three teams there, in the pitch blackest, and they don’t even know where the other team is? “”, he explained to the investigators of the commission.
The staff sergeant also said that in hindsight he ‘probably could have sent another team over there’, before talking about the difficulty of going back on decisions and the distress it caused him then.
“I wondered a lot if I had missed something that could have prevented the killer from leaving the sector, if [la policière] Heidi [Stevenson] would still be alive, if all those people in Wentworth would be alive,” he said.
After the shooter killed 13 people in Portapique on the evening of April 18, he was able to leave the area and spent the night near Debert, before resuming his murderous run on Sunday morning and killing nine other people. including Agent Stevenson.
An occupational health and safety investigator’s report concluded there was an “environment of confusion” over the roles of early RCMP supervisors on Saturday evening. Investigator Lorna MacMillan concluded that this violated the RCMP’s requirement under the Labor Code to ensure that each employee has the “supervision necessary to ensure their health and safety on the job”.
She also said in her March 29 report that district supervisors from the Bible Hill RCMP office should have taken command, but instructions were coming from both Sergeant Rehill and the district supervisors.
In his interview with the commission, the staff sergeant also said that he only learned the next morning that the killer had a fully marked police car. “I was in shock when I saw the photo of the police car,” he told investigators.