Halifax regional police “made no effort to get involved” in the hunt for Gabriel Wortman, says a sergeant from the force’s emergency response team who withdrew after the Nova Scotia mass shootings .
This “despite the requests of the (non-commissioned officers) on the scene,” Charles Naugle, who was one of those non-commissioned officers, told the Mass Victims Commission in an interview last September.
“It was a struggle to get resources, it was a struggle to call people.”
Naugle spent 32 years in the force before retiring, the last 15 as a member of the emergency response team. For the past two years, including April 2020, when the mass shootings took place, he was the team commander of the 28-member unit.
He was called to work before dawn on April 19, 2020.
“This was denied”
Naugle said the sergeant. Craig Robinson, who had been working with the HRP Emergency Response Team the night before and informed him on the morning of April 19, had asked the Acting Surveillance Commander for more resources to search the office and the Wortman’s apartment on Portland Street.
“He asked for additional members just to have enough to fill a team, and that he refused,” Naugle said.
The RCMP wanted the Wortman’s Portland Street clinic to be searched, he said.
“We had information about explosives, we had information about all firearms. We didn’t have enough to get into. We barely had enough to look at him confidently.
Naugle told public investigation lawyers that Halifax Regional Police “will probably get mad at me for coming and saying this.”
He used the analogy of a burning house in a narrow subdivision.
“Your neighbor is an idiot, you don’t get along with him, but he’s your neighbor anyway. His house is on fire and he is outside with a garden hose and is trying to put out the fire. And you see, one, his place is burning, and two, the flames are going to threaten you. Do you go there with your garden hose and help it, or do you just say it doesn’t matter because you’re an idiot?
“Extensive resources to help”
Halifax regional police “had a lot of resources to help,” Naugle said. “We didn’t make … any effort to withstand these resources, one in anticipation of a problem in Halifax, which everyone could see coming down the pipe, or standing. They … getting up and saying, ‘RCMP, this is what we offer you. Do you want us to make the outer perimeter? ”
Halifax police have dog equipment they did not bring, he said, noting that they may have offered it.
“Before I left, everyone knew my vision of what happened,” Naugle said. “No one has ever done anything to influence my opinion on how we haven’t helped.”
Members of HRP’s criminal investigation division were “asking to come in” on the morning of April 19 to search for data on the mass murderer.
“We had meetings with him,” Naugle said. “Two of the members (of the emergency response team) who were working that night, like Saturday night with Craig Robinson until Sunday morning, actually dealt with him at the clinic in the … incident of a blocked police car. So they knew him. We didn’t do … as far as I know, we weren’t doing anything to dig up information. ”
Naugle noted that the photo the investigators obtained of the replica of the Wortman police car during the dentist’s murderous attack probably came from family members of Lisa Banfield, the killer’s spouse.
“We received a photo of this from one of the family members and sent it to the RCMP that morning,” Naugle said.
“I don’t know if this was the first time this photo came out, but if it’s the first time it came out, that would be a testament to why we should have been digging up more information at the end of it. Investigating, just detective work “.
“No one was calling”
Naugle said both he and Robinson asked HRP service officers to bring in more members of the emergency response team as the Mounties chased the killer.
“It’s 7:48 a.m. (April 19, 2020) when I got a phone call from (now Inspector) Jeff Clarke saying they weren’t calling anyone.”
Naugle said there were other resources his former force might have called to work that day.
“Basically, we managed it as usual.”
All the agents working that day “knew this could explode into something incredibly horrible,” Naugle said.
“It’s not that it wasn’t horrible in the end, but we knew it wasn’t far from becoming an incredible catastrophe at HRM. We had (had) other resources we could have called.”
The force has three unmarked sports utility vehicles, night vision equipment and four or five “highly skilled” snipers, Naugle said.
And the city’s emergency response team had trained with the RCMP’s emergency response team and “they knew each other quite a bit,” he said.
‘We would
“Of course, there’s always a bit of grinding of the gears, but it’s all a lot of type A personalities. But I can assure you that at HRM, if they called us and asked us to stop and look at their cars to help. on the outer perimeter, we would. ”
Naugle told the investigation that there are U.S. law enforcement websites where he would read reports on how different forces dealt with active shooters.
“I’ve studied these things up and down and maybe I don’t have a social life, but I’ve always thought about how we would handle something like this in Halifax,” he said.
“And every time I thought about how we would do it, it was with everything we had. He was trying to overcome what he was doing wrong. Never in my life would I have thought that I should try to figure out how to get permission to call the resources that are sitting in the locker room. And that is frustrating. We could have spent an extra $ 10,000; great thing, “Naugle said.
Spending so much money “to fit everyone in the backyard and have everything ready and they don’t need you,” would only have meant sending people home later, he said.
“This is frustrating beyond the belief that we didn’t try, we didn’t try at all, and I’ll tell anyone who wants to ask,” Naugle said. “This bothers me to an incredible degree.”