Mountie who shot at fire hall had 'no doubt' N.S. gunman was outside

Const. Terry Brown said there was no doubt in his mind a man in a safety vest running behind an RCMP cruiser towards the fire hall in Onslow, N.S., in the midst of the frenzied hunt for a mass shooter was the suspect he'd heard the gunman's spouse describe hours earlier. 

The RCMP officer recounted the "split-second" decision he and his partner made before discharging their carbines in the direction of what turned out to be a civilian on April 19, 2020, in a lengthy interview with the public inquiry examining the response to the mass shooting that claimed the lives of 22 people, including a pregnant woman and a Mountie. 

"I was sure that he was — if he got away, he was going to go kill more people, because there was no doubt in my mind … that that's the guy we were looking for," Brown told investigators with the Mass Casualty Commission on March 10, 2022, according to new details released by the inquiry on Monday.

Brown said he was not aware the fire hall was being used as a comfort centre for people told to leave their homes in Portapique, N.S., the tiny community 28 kilometres away where 13 people had been murdered the night before. He also told the inquiry he did not know that a fellow Mountie from Pictou County had been sent there to provide security that morning.

The gunman was driving a replica RCMP cruiser and was disguised as a Mountie. Brown said his partner, Const. Dave Melanson, tried to radio colleagues after they slammed on the brakes of their unmarked Nissan Altima less than 100 metres from the fire hall to alert them they saw an RCMP cruiser and who they thought was Gabriel Wortman, the man wanted for murder. 

Brown said he didn't even notice a second person at the hall, the actual RCMP officer sitting in his patrol car, and had his carbine pointed at another man in the parking lot who was wearing a vest. 

"And he's looking at me and then he ducks behind the car, and I was sure he was getting a gun," Brown told the inquiry. "We're yelling, like, 'Show us your hands.' And this is happening very, very quickly."

He said he started firing when the man started running toward the building and in retrospect, the "tunnel vision" of concentration he experienced meant that he didn't hear his own rifle go off or realize that his partner also fired. 

The man wearing the high-visibility yellow and orange safety vest, David Westlake, was the emergency management co-ordinator for Colchester County and was at the fire hall to help connect displaced people with support provided by the Red Cross. 

Westlake, who spoke to commission investigators last June, has a different recollection of the same moments, when he said he was walking behind the Pictou County cruiser and a grey vehicle screeched to a halt across the parking lot. 

"I never heard 'police' or 'show your hands.' I heard 'get down.' And I am adamant to this day this is what I heard," Westlake said in his interview.

"I remember a shot that sounded like a sonic boom and then another one that was really loud and I'm moving at this time." 

Brown fired four rounds and Melanson fired one, inquiry documents show. 

Westlake said he ran inside yelling "shots fired," and ducked down as he entered the fire hall to pick up the portable radio he had dropped. It would be hours before he realized he was the Mounties' target.