The Atlantic Denture Clinic is guarded by police in Dartmouth, N.S. on Monday, April 20, 2020. It has long been known that the province’s 911 dispatch system, and some RCMP officers themselves, were told early on by witnesses that the shooter, Gabriel Wortman, was driving what appeared to be a white RCMP cruiser, but this was not publicized for 12 hours.Andrew Vaughan/The Canadian Press
After two years of waiting, public hearings into Canada’s worst mass murder are finally under way in Halifax. This week, the commission holding the hearings released evidence about one of the most controversial aspects of the tragedy: that the RCMP waited 12 hours before sharing with the public that the killer was disguised as one of their own.
It has long been known that the province’s 911 dispatch system, and some RCMP officers themselves, were told early on by witnesses that the shooter, Gabriel Wortman, was driving what appeared to be a white RCMP cruiser. But a report prepared for the Mass Casualty Commission on the killings in April, 2020, in Portapique, N.S., fills in the terrible details.
A terrified woman whose husband was the first person Wortman killed, and who herself would moments later be murdered while on the phone with a 911 operator, said that there was a car in her driveway and that it was “decked and labelled RCMP … [inaudible] … but it’s not a police officer.”
A local man, who was driving with his wife through Portapique, passed what he believed was an RCMP officer in his cruiser, only to have the man pull up beside their car and open fire. The couple sped away and happened upon real RCMP officers responding to the shootings.
The wife of the driver told officers the shooter’s car appeared to be an RCMP police cruiser. Her husband, who was wounded, told police the same thing at 5 a.m. the next morning, after he was released from hospital.
Nova Scotia RCMP waited 12 hours before alerting public gunman was driving a lookalike police car
This was vital information. Wortman, enraged after a fight with his partner, killed 13 people in and around the remote Portapique area between 10 p.m. and 10:40 p.m. on April 18, 2020, and then disappeared into the night.
The next day, Wortman killed three people in a home about 60 kilometres from Portapique. He killed two more people after pulling them over on a highway. He also shot a woman walking along a road.
After those killings, at 10:17 a.m., the RCMP finally posted on Twitter that the gunman might be driving a replica RCMP cruiser and wearing an RCMP uniform.
Still in his fake Mountie car, Wortman went on to shoot and wound a real RCMP officer. He then collided with the vehicle of a second Mountie and shot her dead. He also killed a man who pulled over to see if he could help out with what he may have thought was an accident involving two RCMP vehicles. Wortman drove off in the man’s car.
By the time an RCMP tactical team shot Wortman dead in a chance encounter at a gas station 100 kilometres south of Portapique, he had killed 22 people.
The RCMP has never explained why it didn’t publicize the information about Wortman’s disguise for 12 hours after first hearing of its possibility, and for almost three hours after Wortman’s partner – who’d been beaten and tied up by Wortman but escaped and hid in the woods until the morning – confirmed to the RCMP that he was driving a vehicle “that looks identical to your police cars.”
Was it a failure of communication? An error made in the fog of a fast-moving murder rampage? A policing decision? All three?
The inquiry’s role is to make recommendations that could prevent similar tragedies. But most of the matters it is looking into under its mandate are related to policing. In much of the country, including Nova Scotia, the RCMP are effectively the provincial police force.
On Tuesday, another commission report showed just how confusing the situation was for the first Mounties who arrived in Portapique.
They were being told an RCMP vehicle was already on site, but couldn’t understand why. They also quickly realized the shooter was going after multiple victims, after running into the couple Wortman had shot at in their car.
They worried their marked cars would make them a target, and decided to abandon them for their own safety and proceed on foot – while Wortman was still killing people in Portapique.
And by 10:30 p.m. on April 18, they knew Wortman’s name and that he was driving a fake RCMP car.
It was a confusing and intense time, far beyond the normal experience of Mounties who police rural areas. But it has left the families of the victims asking questions about the RCMP’s decisions during the killer’s extended rampage. The inquiry is not a trial, but the RCMP is going to feel like it’s in the dock.
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