Just after 10am on April 19, 2020, with the Nova Scotia mass shooting killer still on the loose, having left Portapique 12 hours earlier and having committed further killings in the Wentworth area, two RCMP officers erroneously fired multiple shots at a fellow officer and a civilian emergency responder at the Fire Hall in Onslow. Such incidents draw investigations by the Serious Incident Response Team (SIRT), which is designed to review police shootings to see whether charges may be warranted against an officer. SIRT is civilian-led, and independent from the police or government. SIRT is now led by retired NS Supreme Court Justice Felix Cacchione, and has a team of investigators made up of former and current police officers.
The SIRT report states that two officers drove up to the Onslow Fire Hall in an unmarked Nissan Altima, saw a person they thought was Gabriel Wortman standing next to a marked RCMP car while wearing a high visibility orange and yellow vest, yelled to him to show his hands, and then shot when the person instead ducked behind the police car.
Credible eyewitness reports describe a situation where there was either a sudden, panicked (or at least not cool-headed) reaction to seeing someone who might be the killer, or else one where the officers were deliberately fooled into thinking it was Wortman standing outside the Fire Hall. If it was the former, these officers are in the wrong line of work, and the SIRT report is flawed. If it is the later, then there is potentially much more to uncover about Wortman’s relationship with the RCMP.
