Officer shot in deadly B.C. bank shootout details the attack 2 years later
CTV
Two years after a deadly gun battle between police and a pair of heavily armed assailants stunned the community of Saanich, B.C., one of the officers who was critically injured in the shootout is speaking about it publicly for the first time.
Two years after a deadly gun battle between police and a pair of heavily armed assailants stunned the community of Saanich, B.C., one of the officers who was critically injured in the shootout is speaking about it publicly for the first time.
Saanich police Const. Steven Reichert and six other members of the Greater Victoria Emergency Response Team spent the morning of June 28, 2022, running a security operation for a Victoria police surveillance unit as it gathered intelligence for a drug-trafficking investigation.
"We had six ERT operators in the back of our covert van and our team leader who was the driver," Reichert told CTV News on Friday.
Just after 11 a.m., the team leader got a text message from an operations commander, telling the unit to switch their radios to the Saanich police channel for "some sort of an armed robbery or some sort of a firearms call," the seven-year veteran of the GVERT said.
"We learned that there was two suspects," he recalled. "We heard information they were both in possession of long rifles and they were both wearing balaclavas."
The van began rolling north out of Victoria and into Saanich.
The team listened to the first patrol officers on scene as they tried to establish a perimeter and control traffic outside the Bank of Montreal branch on Shelbourne Street.
