An RCMP agent who alerted his comrades that there could be a departure from Portapique, NS, on the first night of the 2020 massacre, says it was such a hectic night that he does not remember doing the radio broadcast.
Const. Vicki Colford, who has since retired, answered the questions in an affidavit entered as an exhibition of the Mass Accident Commission earlier this month. His statement illustrates how police lost key information about a possible escape route that the gunman is believed to have used to evade police stationed less than a mile away.
On April 18, 2020, Colford was the fourth RCMP officer to arrive the night a gunman killed 13 neighbors and set fire to several homes. Relatives of the people killed the next morning have asked why the police did not do more to close the community and why it took so long to realize that the gunman may have come out on a private road that bordered a blueberry field.
The public investigation that examined the tragedy reviewed surveillance footage, spoke with witnesses and determined that the gunman probably drove through the field and exited Highway 2 a few hundred yards from the main entrance between at 10:41 p.m. and 10:45 p.m.
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 above: 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)
By the time Colford stopped at about 10:32 p.m., two officers had entered the community on foot. After learning that a third party would join them, he decided to check the vehicles at the entrance and make sure that Andrew and Katie MacDonald, who had been shot, received medical attention.
At 10:48 p.m., Colford told his police radio, “If you want to take a look at the map, they tell us there’s a road, a kind of road that someone could get out of here before. Oh, if they know. well the roads “.
But at least three senior officials overseeing the response said they never heard of the broadcast, and Colford herself said she did not realize it did.
“No memory” of radio transmission
It wasn’t until he reviewed the documents in the investigation that he found out about it and “didn’t remember” that he had been told about a later exit or if the woman he spoke to identified the road that connected it, he wrote. Colford 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 didn’t speak clearly. I was trying to keep her quiet while watching our surroundings from the threat,” she said.
A May 2020 aerial map of Portapique with street names added by the Mass Accident Commission. (Mass Victims Commission)
His attention was focused on “trying to keep my head turned to look and be aware” between the nearby fires, the shots fired and the active shooter loose, Colford said.
He said that his hypothesis, based on reading the transcript, was that he made the issue to transmit new information to the risk manager who supervised the response and to anyone else who was part of it.
He said most of his communications that night were made by radio, but he also spoke to senior officials by telephone.
Concerned about the ambush, the detection of vehicles
Another Portapique resident, Harlan Rushton, told the commission that he spoke to a Mountie woman on the way out, saying something like, “You know there’s another way out,” and the officer agreed. .
Colford told the commission he had no recollection of that exchange, but checked about 10 vehicles for clues to the gunman, weapons, cans of gas and anything suspicious.
An RCMP officer spoke to a local resident before hearing him at a court hearing in Portapique on April 22, 2020. On the night of April 18, Const. Vicki Colford was parked at the entrance to Portapique Beach Road. (Andrew Vaughan / The Canadian Press)
His goal, he explained, was to get people out quickly, so the exchanges only lasted a few seconds. He said he scanned the backs of trucks and hatchbacks and got at least one driver to blow them up.
“I had no idea where the perpetrator was … The possibility of an ambush was always on my mind,” he wrote.
“Every time a vehicle came out, it distracted me from my surroundings and I didn’t want anyone to shoot me while I was stopped.”
No need to declare
Lawyers representing the victims’ families had requested that Colford appear as a witness and through the commissioners. she initially said she would be citedthey then granted Colford accommodation so that she could provide a written statement instead of an oral testimony.
The National Police Federation had made the request and submitted confidential personal information that the commissioners considered.
The attorneys representing the participants were able to send their questions to Colford, including requests to clarify statements he had previously made to the RCMP during a interview a few days after the shootings. He answered 63 questions from the committee.
I felt like a “duck sitting”
Colford and Cpl. Natasha Jamieson spent most of the night parked near the mailboxes at the top of Portapique Road. While they were around a partner’s SUV, they tried to protect each other: Colford with a shotgun and Jamieson with his service pistol.
Neither officer had completed carbine training.
“I really felt a lot like a sitting duck, as I couldn’t see much beyond my immediate area due to the lack of street lights,” Colford told the commission.
Colford had previously provided a backup to a colleague: Const. Nick Dorrington, who arrested the gunman for speeding in February 2020, but had no other previous interaction with him and did not know the community so well.
Dorrington is scheduled to testify in the investigation on Monday.
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