Const. Craig Hubble knew he was dealing with a different kind of threat when he saw Jamie and Greg Blair’s little dog in Portapick, North Carolina, its hindquarters torn by a rifle bullet.
The RCMP dog handler realized that the shooter he was looking for was a man so determined to do harm that he would shoot a family pet weighing no more than £ 20.
“This animal was touching to me because I’ve been to other murder scenes, crimes of passion, but never where someone would pour out such fury,” Hubley said Thursday during a public inquiry in Halifax looking at the April mass shootings. 2020
“I believed he was extremely dangerous.”
The Blairs were among the 13 people killed in the village unit. The couple’s two young sons witnessed the death of their parents and managed to escape. When police arrived at the scene on the morning of April 19, 2020, they found the Blair family’s miniature Pinscher wounded and waiting on the step where one of its owners had been killed hours earlier.
Hubbley and other RCMP officers assessed the carnage during a lull as they evacuated their homes for signs of the killer.
A gunman was shot dead by police near a gas station in Anfield, NS (Eric Woolliscroft / CBC)
Const. Ben McLeod, a member of the RCMP’s tactical team, said the scene – which includes two bodies on the side of the road – did not compare to the murder or sudden death he had ever witnessed.
“Revenge is a good word and evil is a good word… To do that was evil,” he said.
McLeod had his own awareness of the man who caused the horror when he picked up Lisa Banfield, the shooter’s wife, after she showed up at a neighbor’s house around dawn.
The experience led many officers to claim the shooter committed suicide in the woods, McLeod said, but their point of view changed when they saw the man’s partner, who was “upset” and nervous to be revealed when he boarded a police vehicle.
“Seeing that she was still so scared that he was looking for her, he kind of clicked and made us think – made me think too – that he’s still ready to end,” McLeod testified.
Hours later, Hubley and McLeod confronted the killer at a gas station in Anfield, NS, and told a group of witnesses about the seconds that led them to fire 23 bullets, killing Gabriel Wortman.
So far, he has been free for more than 13 hours, traveled nearly 200 kilometers and killed 22 people, including many strangers, including a pregnant woman and an RCMP officer, Const. Heidi Stevenson. During much of the riot, he drove a decommissioned cruiser he had equipped to be genuine.
Twenty-two people died on April 18 and 19. Top row left: Gina Gulet, Dawn Gulenchin, Jolene Oliver, Frank Gulenchin, Sean McLeod, Alana Jenkins. Second row: John Hall, Lisa McCully, Joey Weber, Heidi Stevenson, Heather O’Brien and Jamie Blair. Third row from the top: Kristen Beaton, Lillian Campbell, Joan Thomas, Peter Bond, Tom Bagley and Greg Blair. Bottom line: Emily Tuck, Joy Bond, Corey Ellison and Aaron Tuck. (CBC)
McLeod is also reflecting on the attention that the incident drew to him and Hubbley for the shooting of the shooter, as well as the consequences over the past two years on their responding colleagues.
“We all fought. We saw a lot that night. Each of us just wanted to find him, we did everything we could to find him tonight,” he said.
“Two years of grief have passed with the Scots, with the families of the victims who are here. We also lost one of ours, Heidi. Life will never be the same for us.”
“The urgency was indescribable”
The search to find the shooter turned into a race on April 19, when 911 received calls about a new shooting in the Wentworth area, more than 20 kilometers north of the Portapique area.
Hubley and McLeod took off and were soon relocated to a property in Glenholm, NS, where the couple called for help after seeing the archer climb their alley.
“Knowing what happened in Portapik, knowing that he was potentially there in Glenholm, the sense of urgency was indescribable,” Hubley said.
He and McLeod were together in the back of the tactical vehicle of the emergency response team as it approached the home. Hubley said his focus is on keeping his German Shepherd calm and assessing on his phone the layout of the property, which is wooded and strewn with heavy equipment – which he sees as hiding places.
“Close but not close enough”
Before he and his dog began searching for the suspect’s trail, the voice of an RCMP dispatcher was heard on the radio informing them of new shootings on Plains Road in Debert, NS, where the shooter shot Kristen Beaton and Heather O’Brien on the less than 10 kilometers away.
“I remember feeling a little defeated that he found two more victims when it looked like we were seconds behind him,” Hubley said.
At that moment, Hubble and McLeod flew together in the Suburban – McLeod provided cover and Hubble was behind the wheel. He estimated that they had traveled “as fast as this truck could go” at about 180 kilometers per hour for most of the next hour.
They did not stay long in Debert, where other members were on stage. Hubley said there was a “simple feeling” that the shooter had moved on and would head to a more populated area. Soon there was a sighting of a minor highway in the Brookfield area – closer to Halifax – and officers tore up the main highway to the city, trying to determine the best place to overtake the shooter.
Hubble speaks during the Halifax Commission’s inquiry into mass casualties on Thursday, April 14, 2022 (Andrew Vaughan / Canadian Press)
All the while, they monitored police radio communications, trying to warn Halifax officials and come up with the best solution, they said. McLeod said it is not uncommon for them to have to process a lot of information at once.
The updates coming on the radio included that two members had been hit – Const. Chad Morrison, who was wounded and survived, and Stevenson, who was later learned to have died after a shooting at Shubenakadie.
As they exited the main highway north of this scene, they came across other RCMP officers who had set up a blockade. They decided to continue on to the city, this time on the secondary highway, bypassing the nearby Anfield RCMP squad as a precaution, knowing that the shooter was aimed at Mountis.
But problems arose. They were burning gas, and Hubble said he knew that if they were to be called to answer in the area of Halifax, where he was usually located, they must be prepared.
Surveillance footage from Elmsdale Petro-Canada shows the shooter of the petrol pump against the members of the emergency response team around 11:16 am AT on April 19, 2020 (Mass Victims Commission)
They stopped at Irving Big Stop to tread twice, stopping to make sure members of the Halifax Regional Police Tactical Team parked at the scene knew the suspect was last seen in a silver jeep. . They soon left for nearby Elmsdale to follow up on the Sobies surveillance report in Truro, which proved unfounded.
When they returned to the gas station, the goal was to fill up – but they said their task was always to find the killer.
“We are used to [having a feeling]as cops using intuition, call it what you will. [We were] “Having this discussion, we think he’s close to us, let’s stay in this area and stay mobile, trying to find him,” McLeod said.
On Wednesday, the public investigation found out that the shooter had first stopped at Petro-Canada in Elmsdale, near Anfield, at a pump against other members of the RCMP emergency response team. He left before they could be recognized, the investigation said.
Hubble and McLeod said they did not know about it, did not know that the gunman was at the Big Stop when they stopped, and that they had no instructions to execute the suspects.
But they knew he might be in the area, and McLeod planned to watch Hubley’s back by the pump.
Seconds later, they fired.
McLeod appears in the Commission of Inquiry into Mass Victims of Mass Murders in Rural Nova Scotia. (Andrew Vaughn / Canadian Press)
As he got out of his car, Hubble said he checked the position of his pistol on his thigh, as was routine, and noticed the man sitting in a gray hatchback next door.
“He was wearing a white T-shirt and looked very sweaty, very exhausted. I think I used an “animal” to describe it. “Whether he just lost a battle or ended a big one, it looked like that,” Hubley said.
“He was breathing hard, there was a swelling on his head. There was blood flowing from it. And what struck me the most in that quarter of a second was that there was a wound that didn’t address.”
He said the man’s appearance was so disturbing that he began to pull out his pistol and realized it was the shooter, and called out to McLeod, who was about to leave the suburbs.
Hubley shot the shooter while he was sitting in the stolen Mazda of the victim Gina Gulet at 11:25 a.m. AT on April 19, 2020, at the Enfield Irving Big Stop. (Commission on Mass Victims)
Hubble said he spent time studying photos of the shooter trapped at a makeshift command post in Great Village, NS, early in his shift and recognizing him in the car.
“When I shouted, ‘Benny, it’s him!’ a hand rose with a black and silver pistol in it.
“I believed he would shoot me,” Hubley said, adding that he fired while the shooter was “not in a position to shoot,” knowing from training that several rounds were needed to stop the threat.
Police responded to the gas station in Anfield, NS, on Sunday, April 19, 2020.
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