'Nobody intervened': Portapique resident dies after speaking out about mental health issues

A resident of Portapique, N.S., who survived the mass shooting that began in the small community in April 2020 has died suddenly after years of "hell" trying to move away from the area where many of his friends and neighbours were killed.

Leon Joudrey, 54, died Sunday, just weeks after he and Portapique residents, their loved ones and victims' families spoke with the Mass Casualty Commission leading the public inquiry into the massacre. A transcript of that group meeting was released by the inquiry Thursday.

Joudrey talked about how hard it was navigating the mental health system in the immediate aftermath of the shootings, where 13 of the 22 victims were from Portapique. He said an offer was made to set him up with a professional who would point him in the right direction, but he was "in no state of mind" to deal with that.

"When you're shaking every day and somebody tells you it'll be three weeks [for help], doesn't help you much," Joudrey told the commission. "It's like calling 911 and getting a recording."

The RCMP confirmed they were called to a home in Portapique on Sunday afternoon where a man was found dead. The death is not considered suspicious, and the case was turned over to the provincial medical examiner.

On social media, many people have been sharing an updated image of the ribbon representing the victims of the mass shooting. It originally bore the number 23 to represent 22 victims and an unborn child, but has been changed to 24 to include Joudrey — a man described in his obituary as a father and lover of the outdoors.

Joudrey was the person who Lisa Banfield, the gunman's spouse, ran to for help early on April 19, 2020. He told police and the inquiry that Banfield appeared at his door shaking and upset around 6 a.m. AT, saying she had spent the night in the woods after escaping the gunman.

He told the commission he'd spent most of the past two and a half years since the shootings away from his property, which he was struggling to sell, but "I didn't really have a spot to live; that was a little rough."

Mallory Colpitts, a former resident of Portapique who also lived through the massacre, was in the small group session with Joudrey and others in September. 

Colpitts said she and Joudrey had similar struggles trying to get out of the area, and Joudrey told her about how he spent many months in a cabin in the woods rather than his Portapique home.

"He expressed to me that … although it was isolated, it still felt to be the better alternative than to remain there, you know, surrounded every day by those memories," Colpitts told CBC News.

Colpitts said she couch-surfed with friends and family for months before she managed to sell her home. The memory of hiding in her closet with a loaded gun in the early hours of April 19, not knowing if the killer would come to her next, haunts her. 

When things fell through with the new house she had hoped to purchase, Colpitts said she found herself in a desperate situation with nowhere to stay amid the ongoing housing crisis in Nova Scotia. 

She ended up staying for weeks in victim Lisa McCully's vacant home in Portapique, across the road from the mass shooter's burned-down property.