BREAKING: The Mass Casualty Commission's 2,934-page final report calls for sweeping national changes to policing and a much greater focus on violence prevention in communities. Here are the highlights from its just-released findings and 130 recommendati...
| Posted: 2 minutes ago | Updated: 4 minutes ago | 13 Min Read
TRURO, N.S. — A series of RCMP failures and missed preventative opportunities contributed to the April 2020 killing rampage that took the lives of 22 people in Nova Scotia, including a pregnant woman. The seven-volume, 2,934-page final report, co-authored by commissioners Leanne Fitch, the former Fredericton police chief, and Toronto lawyer Kim Stanton, summarized the April 19 and 20, 2020, rampage of killer Gabriel Wortman, a 51-year-old Dartmouth denturist who owned two properties in Portapique, a seaside Colchester County community about 40 kilometres west of Truro.
"While no person or institution could have predicted the perpetrator’s specific actions on April 18 and 19, 2020, his pattern and escalation of violence could have and should have been addressed," MacDonald said."Many red flags about his violent and illegal behaviour were known by a broad range of people and had been brought to the attention of police and others over a number of years.
Lisa Banfield, the common-law wife of Gabriel Wortman, testifies at the Mass Casualty Commission public inquiry into the April 2020 mass murders in rural Nova Scotia in Halifax on July 15, 2022. - Andrew Vaughn / The Canadian Press At the time of the mass killings, the perpetrator owned four decommissioned police vehicles, purchased at GCSurplus, the federal government’s online auction site. He acquired various items to transform one of the decommissioned vehicles into a strikingly accurate replica of an RCMP cruiser. Many people had seen or knew about the replica RCMP.
After killing 13 people, the perpetrator left Portapique through a seldom-used road along a blueberry field and spent the night at a partially obscured parking lot in the Debert Business Park. The commissioners came up with dozens of examples of the police response that ought to have been done differently.community members were an essential part of the initial response to the mass casualty. Their central role was not adequately acknowledged, and the indispensable information they could provide was either ignored or not factored into the RCMP’s response.
the RCMP’s failure to act on the clear and repeated information about the perpetrator’s replica RCMP cruiser RCMP Supt. Darren Campbell testifies at the Mass Casualty Commission public inquiry in Halifax on July 25, 2022. - Kelly Clark / The Canadian Press the police force’s directive to the Nova Scotia Medical Examiner Service not to release information about cause, manner, and circumstances of death to family members was unnecessary and compounded the grief and mistrust of some family members.Critical incident response
ensure that planning, policies, and training include other agencies that will be involved in a critical incident response, fostering a culture of interoperability among emergency responders; The perpetrator’s history “reflects the broader context of our collective social and institutional failures to perceive and respond effectively to gender-based, intimate partner, and family violence,” the commissioners found. “Such failures extend well beyond this perpetrator. We found that there is a close connection between gender-based, intimate partner, and family violence — in which the perpetrator engaged throughout his adult life — and the rarer phenomenon of mass casualty incidents.
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