HALIFAX –
Nova Scotia paramedic Melanie Lowe struggled to maintain composure on Monday as she described the night two years ago when four children boarded her ambulance and described how their parents had just been shot dead.
“They were very frank about what they saw,” Lowe told a public inquiry into a mass shooting in April 2020 that began in Portapique, NS, which would have claimed 22 lives in two days in the north and center of Nova Scotia.
“They didn’t really understand what had happened … The children explained in detail, minute by minute, what had happened, what they had seen and how it was on fire in their house. There were shootings. People were lying on the ground. away from home “.
Lowe was between three paramedics and an ambulance dispatcher who spoke to the investigation into his work from April 18-19, 2020. The four said they were told very little about what was happening while the RCMP searched for the killer. And they complained about the lack of support they received after their employer, the Emergency Medical Services.
“I kept him together that day,” Lowe recalled as he described listening to the children as they cleaned the blood of some of them as they drove to Truro, NS Hospital.
“I didn’t realize how much it was going to affect me. It was definitely nothing that any child should see, hear or experience. Now I find it harder than then.”
The investigation has revealed that shortly after 22:00 on April 18, 2020, the killer approached the home of a neighbor in Portapique. He fatally shot Greg Blair on the front deck and then burst into the house to shoot Jamie Blair as his two young children, ages 11 and nine, watched from behind a bed.
About 10 minutes later, the boys fled when they realized that the killer had set fire to the house before leaving. They sprinted to the home of Lisa McCully, who had been shot dead minutes earlier as she walked to the edge of her property.
Blair’s boys did not see her as they headed to McCully’s house, where her two children, a 12-year-old boy and a 10-year-old boy, were hiding.
Blair’s 11-year-old son called 911 at 10:16 p.m. and told the operator his parents were dead. The boys also confirmed that the killer was driving a replica of the police car with emergency lights and stickers.
The four remained in the basement of the McCullys’ house until midnight, when the Mounted decided it was safe for them to leave.
The investigation has revealed that 13 people were shot dead in Portapique that night. The killer, who had set fire to several houses, used a side road to evade a police blockade around 10:45 p.m. He killed nine others the next day during a 13-hour crash that ended when he was shot by two soldiers at a gas station north of Halifax.
The night the murder began, Lowe was working with advanced care paramedic Jeff Aucoin, who talked about the impact the sad conversation the children had on him.
“There were a lot of things that were said there that were hard to hear from young children,” Aucoin said. “These are things that just don’t go away. It’s something that’s always there and it’s hard to undo.”
Lowe and Aucoin said they were given little information about what was going on in Portapique when they arrived and were tasked with evacuating a local resident.
“Where we were sitting, we could see the fires,” Aucoin said. “That’s when we realized we were obviously in a place where we weren’t supposed to be … We never had any details about what might have been going on.”
Bruce Cox, an advanced emergency medical dispatcher, told the investigation how difficult it was for him to respond to emergency calls on the second day of the tragedy because his supervisors did not share information with him.
At one point, on April 19, 2020, he was on a 911 call from a person who had discovered a body along the freeway in Wentworth, NS. Thirty minutes later, he participated in another call about discovery of two more victims of gunfire 30 kilometers away. in Debert, NS
“We weren’t getting any information from anyone,” Cox said. “Our imagination went wild.”
Jesse Brine, a primary care paramedic who worked with Lowe on the second day, confirmed that paramedics were left in the dark about the danger they faced.
“When there are multiple agencies involved, no one really knows who is in charge,” he said.
The investigation has revealed that there was a great deal of confusion among RCMP commanders when the tragedy unfolded, especially on the first night.
Cox and others complained about the lack of training when it comes to cases of active shooters.
“We’re no better prepared than we were two years ago,” he said.
In addition, they all said that they were then offered very little support, apart from a couple of pieces of information and a little help from volunteers who offered peer support.
“There were more things that should have been done,” Lowe said, adding that he was not offered any free time. Aucoin said more or less the same thing: “We were left alone.”
This report from The Canadian Press was first published on June 13, 2022.