The RCMP intentionally withheld key details, including the number of casualties, and evaded questions that officers knew the answers to in the early days after the Nova Scotia massacre in April 2020, according to a public inquiry. about the tragedy.
The Mass Victims Commission released its report on Tuesday on how the RCMP and the government communicated on April 18-19, 2020, a riot that left several people injured, houses destroyed and 22 people deaths, including a pregnant woman.
Records show that public statements made by the elderly after the killings did not reflect the latest information about which they had been reported internally or the intelligence officers had gathered behind the scenes.
During the first press conference on the night of April 19, 2020, the superintendent in chief. Chris Leather told reporters that “more than” 10 people had died and that the investigation was continuing. When asked if he knew the total, Leather said he did not know and “we are not fully aware of what this total may be.”
He said the number could rise and bodies could be found on some of the burned properties.
But that was not the whole picture.
Number of victims detained
The public inquiry found that the “shared internal knowledge” with Leather an hour before that press conference “suggested that the death toll was at least 17” and that he had known for hours that his agents had discovered at least 14 bodies.
Lia Scanlan, the civilian director of strategic communications for the Nova Scotia RCMP, told the commission in an interview that they decided on the number 10, not because the families had been notified, but because they had to agree. get a number and send your speech notes to be translated into French.
He said they knew the number of bodies would change and that the plan had been to provide an updated total the next day.
But things did not go as planned because that night, the country’s top mountie, Commissioner Brenda Lucki, shared information about a higher total with some media: first 13 and then 17.
The investigation found that some news organizations were confused about whether Lucki’s total release included the gunman. For example, CBC News reported that night Lucki said the death toll was 16, plus the shooter.
The death toll had already risen
The public investigation has found that at 7pm, the RCMP knew Const. Heidi Stevenson and 17 others were killed and Lucki published this issue.
By 11 p.m., police had discovered the 17 crime scenes and knew there were potentially 22 victims, plus the gunman. Eight of the gunman’s victims were found inside or near burning structures.
Twenty-two people died on April 18 and 19, 2020. Top row from left: Gina Goulet, Dawn Gulenchyn, Jolene Oliver, Frank Gulenchyn, Sean McLeod, Alanna Jenkins. Second row: John Zahl, Lisa McCully, Joey Webber, Heidi Stevenson, Heather O’Brien and Jamie Blair. Third row from above: Kristen Beaton, Lillian Campbell, Joanne Thomas, Peter Bond, Tom Bagley and Greg Blair. Bottom row: Emily Tuck, Joy Bond, Corrie Ellison and Aaron Tuck. (CBC)
The RCMP’s investigation record said “confirmation is still needed with relatives to determine the exact number of people killed,” the investigation found.
Meanwhile, inconsistencies led to a large number of media inquiries into the RCMP.
“It sounds awful and as a result I had to ask my whole team to turn off their phones. Sir help me !!” Scanlan wrote to his counterpart at the RCMP headquarters in Ottawa.
Strike on the history of violence
At that first press conference, Leather said the gunman was not known to police. The chief superintendent also said he had no knowledge of a history of violence.
But the investigation has found that behind the scenes, RCMP officers had already gathered records related to Gabriel Wortman’s previous relationships with police officers and others.
Not long after RCMP officers shot and killed the gunman at a gas station in Enfield, Nova Scotia, another Mountie from Nova Scotia found that Wortman had previously been charged with assaulting a teenager in Dartmouth and received a conditional leave. The gunman completed parole, but did not leave him with a criminal record.
Another officer compiled a profile that summarized the gunman’s interactions with the Halifax Regional Police, including a 2010 complaint that threatened his parents. The profile included mention of Const. Greg Wiley is a “friend” of the gunman and has never seen guns at his Portapique cottage.
The same profile summed up a March 2011 advice that the gunman wanted to “kill a cop” and possibly had weapons in his Portapique cottage.
The RCMP would not address this advice until months later, after CBC News obtained a copy of the 2011 police bulletin under the Freedom of Information Act. At the time, the RCMP said the bulletin had been routinely purged from its system and that they did not have access to it while responding to the mass shooting.
Previous interaction with the police
Prior to the deadly confrontation with RCMP officers in Enfield, the gunman’s most recent interaction with police took place outside his dental prosthesis clinic in Dartmouth in February 2020. Halifax officers they described a man who got “extremely furious and trembling” because he was parking on his commercial lot. The man refused to pull a chain to let the officers out.
Query records do not specify whether Leather received information about this information or whether it sent the profile by email.
On April 21, 2020, the RCMP publicly stated that the gunman had no criminal record and did not include any reference to how he was charged with assault or investigated for making threats or possessing weapons, the investigation found. .
5 press conferences in April
The following week, the RCMP held four more press conferences: on 20, 22, 24 and 28 April.
On April 20, RCMP communications officials in Ottawa agreed to postpone questions to their Nova Scotia counterparts.
But ahead of an afternoon press conference, Lucki reposted information on the number of casualties, saying 18 more people were killed by the gunman. The Prime Minister echoed this figure in a briefing on COVID-19.
When Leather spoke to the media conference, he said there were “more than 19 victims.” He also said they were all adults, even though Emily Tuck was 17 years old.
By then, RCMP officers knew his age and had notified Tuck’s relatives of his death and that of his parents. The investigation noted that a GoFundMe page publicly stated his age.
I knew the teen was among the victims
Leather handwritten notes from April 20th referred to a “teenage woman” among the confirmed dead.
Internally, the RCMP Staff Sergeant. Steve Halliday emailed two colleagues asking about the discrepancy and the sgt. Laura Seeley responded that Leather “disclosed what he felt was confirming at the time.”
It is unclear from commission documents why Leather merely referred to more than 19 when investigators the night before had said 22.
On April 21, the RCMP of Nova Scotia said in a Facebook post that there were 22 victims and clarified that one victim was 17 years old.
Cruise replica information
One of the main issues raised by the families of the people killed on the second day of the attack is why the RCMP did not warn the public before the gunman drove a replica of the police cruiser. Three people had mentioned a type of police car involved half an hour after the first 911 call.
During the April 20 press conference, Leather said the simulated cruise “was first reported to us in the morning. [of April 19]”And he never explained where the RCMP photo of the gunman ‘s vehicle came from.
RCMP Nova Scotia tweeted the replica of the gunman’s police cruise at 10:17 a.m. on April 19, 2020. (RCMP Nova Scotia / Twitter)
On April 22, Leather clarified that the details of the man armed with a police car and uniform “arrived in full in the early hours of Sunday morning. [April 19]after a key witness was located and interviewed “.
In response to a question about why it took so long to inform the public, Leather said that “once this information was collected, our communications section immediately tweeted it.”
This was not exactly true, as it was almost three hours after the RCMP obtained a photo of the cruiser that tweeted an image warning the public.
On April 24, the sd. Darren Campbell reiterated that the “critical” details of the car, such as his photo, “did not emerge until the early hours of the morning of the 19th.”
He also said the officers in charge believed they had counted all the cruise ships out of service of the gunman and took this into account when considering notifying the public.
Top Mountie expressed disappointment
On 28 April, Deputy Commissioner Lee Bergerman, Leather, Campbell and Scanlan held a conference with the RCMP headquarters. According to the investigation documents, Lucki expressed his disappointment at that phone call about the press conferences held by the RCMP of Nova Scotia.
“In particular, Lucki considered that the RCMP of Nova Scotia had disobeyed its instructions to include specific information on the firearms used by the perpetrator,” states a summary of the Mass Victims Commission.
In his notes, Campbell wrote that he had told the RCMP’s Strategic Communications Unit not to disclose information about the author’s firearms out of concern that it might jeopardize the ongoing investigation.