TRURO, NS –
Investigation into the 2020 mass shooting in Nova Scotia is being heard on Thursday by a retired Mountie who has been granted special adjustments to ensure he is not traumatized again by having to relive the tragic 13-hour event.
After nearly 40 years of service, Sgt. Al Carroll was one month away from retiring on April 18, 2020, when he was called to the detachment in Bible Hill, NS, where he was one of the first to know that an active shooter was loose in nearby Portapique, NS.
Carroll answers questions by a Zoom call instead of attending in person, and the commission of inquiry has agreed to allow him to take as many breaks as he needs.
As a former Colchester County District Commander, Carroll is the first senior Mountie to testify with special adaptations, but he won’t be the last.
The three commissioners of the investigation agreed on Tuesday to grant accommodation to two other high-level deputies, who were told that they should not face cross-examination by lawyers representing the relatives of the 22 victims.
The move prompted several lawyers to boycott hearings on Wednesday, and protests continued on Thursday.
FAMILY PROTEST
Outside the courtroom of a Truro hotel, a dozen people protested on the sidewalk, most carrying home banners.
Among them was Charlene Bagley, whose father, Tom, was shot dead by the gunman in early April 19, 2020, when he was walking down Hunter Road in West Wentworth, New York.
“Families have been patient enough,” she said, holding up a neon green sign that said “23 reasons to tell the truth,” referring to the fact that one of the 22 victims was pregnant.
“We wanted answers and we wanted the truth … With the announcement of this week’s accommodation, it just shows that we will probably never get it.”
Bagley said the informed approach to the trauma of the investigation is wrong.
“Trauma for whom?” she asked. “They don’t think about the other people involved and their trauma, just the officers. Their trauma seems to outweigh that of others.”
The investigation has heard that the attack of the killer in Portapique began around 22:00 after he hit and tied up his wife in fact and started firing on the neighbors and setting fire to their houses. Disguised as Mountie and driving a replica of the RCMP cruise, he killed 13 people in Portapique before escaping.
Last week, the investigation published a summary of evidence pointing to considerable confusion about who was in charge of the RCMP operation that night. The investigation also heard testimonies last week about the “communications chaos” that occurred when the RCMP’s two-way radios were overwhelmed by too much traffic.
The issue of who was in charge at those crucial hours was addressed in a previous occupational safety and health report, which found that the RCMP had violated the Federal Labor Code by failing to ensure that employees had the necessary oversight.
During an investigation hearing on May 19, commission chairman Michael MacDonald asked another staff sergeant, Steve Halliday, if it would have been better if only one person was in charge the first night.
“I agree with you that only one person (should be at the helm) when possible,” Halliday said, acknowledging that at least three other people were issuing orders the first night. “But with police operations, there is sometimes a tendency to have multiple people, and it can create problems with whoever is in charge and tie up the radios.”
As for Carroll, he could face questions about what he knew about the type of car the killer was driving. During an earlier interview with commission investigators, he said the information he received indicated that police were looking for an old, out-of-service police car that had no marks.
But that’s not what Portapique’s witnesses said in the 911 calls. The investigation has heard that the callers and witnesses at the scene repeatedly describe the vehicle as a fully marked cruise, with emergency lights.
In addition, Carroll could be asked why he and other mounties did not use an advanced mapping program, known as Pictometry, to look for possible escape routes while police searched for the killer. Carroll told researchers he was never trained to use pictometry.
Using an atlas of roads and other maps, Carroll and another Mountie concluded that there was only one way for a vehicle to get out of the neighborhood. But they were wrong. At around 10:45 p.m., the gunman escaped by driving down a dirt road next to a field of blueberries.
“That didn’t show up on the map we were looking at,” Carroll told investigators.
The next day, the gunman killed nine more people as he traveled more than 100 miles north and central Nova Scotia.
The investigation has heard that the gunman, dental prosthesis technician Gabriel Wortman, 51, was shot dead by two assembly crews shortly before 11:30 a.m. when he stopped at a gas station in the north from Halifax to refuel a stolen car.
This report from The Canadian Press was first published on May 26, 2022.