RCMP supervisor during N.S. mass shooting took extended leave amid second guessing – RisePEI
One of many Mounties who oversaw the preliminary response to the mass capturing in Nova Scotia was off work for at the least 16 months afterwards, saying he struggled with questions on his personal choices through the rampage.
Workers Sgt. Brian Rehill — a danger supervisor on the RCMP’s Operational Communications Centre in Truro, N.S. — instructed investigators with the general public inquiry investigating the killings that assist from different officers helped him address the aftermath.
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Nonetheless, he was nonetheless off work on the time of his interview on Jan. 15. “I’m a bit rusty as a result of I haven’t labored since September 2020,” he mentioned. The inquiry eliminated the explanations behind Rehill’s absence from the transcript of the interview, saying it was “private data.”
Within the remaining doc, the 32-year-veteran of the power describes a profession that started in a small city on Newfoundland’s Nice Northern Peninsula and included rural policing assignments in Cape Breton and northeastern Nova Scotia.
As a danger supervisor, he mentioned he labored alongside 911 name takers and dispatchers at thecommunications centre in Truro, giving security instructions to officers “engaged in high-risk actions” throughout non-business hours when district supervisors and commanders aren’t on obligation.
Throughout his interview, Rehill spoke about his resolution to not shortly ship in a second group of officers to assist the primary three officers who superior into Portapique, N.S., after the primary reviews of shootings had been acquired on the evening of April 18, 2020.
Legal professionals for victims’ households have mentioned that if the RCMP had a full complement of six officers on obligation that evening — fairly than the minimal 4 — and a system to trace officers, a second staff may need been in a position to advance up one other street to the place the killer truly was.
Rehill mentioned he might have confronted criticism if he’d despatched in a second staff and officers had shot at each other. “Folks could be saying, ‘What the hell had been you considering, Rehill, having two or three groups there within the pitch black and so they don’t know the place the opposite one is?”’ he mentioned within the interview.
The workers sergeant additionally mentioned that with hindsight, “I most likely might have despatched one other staff in there,” and he then spoke of the problem of trying again on the choices taken, the misery it created for him and the reassurances he acquired from different officers.
“I used to be second-guessing myself so much and questioning, did I miss one thing that, had I not missed it, he (the killer) wouldn’t have gotten out of there and (Const.) Heidi (Stevenson) could be alive, all these folks in Wentworth could be alive, that form of factor,” he instructed the investigator. After the gunman killed 13 folks and escaped from Portapique on April 18, he spent the evening in close by Debert earlier than resuming his rampage and killing 9 extra folks, together with Stevenson.
An occupational well being and security investigator’s report that checked out office compliance points concluded there was an “atmosphere of confusion” over the roles of the preliminary RCMP supervisors on the evening of the mass capturing.
Labour investigator Lorna MacMillan mentioned this breached the RCMP’s requirement below the Labour Code to make sure every worker has the “supervision crucial to make sure their well being and security at work.”
She additionally mentioned in her March 29 report that the district supervisors from the Bible Hill RCMP workplace ought to have assumed command, however directions had been coming from each Rehill and the district supervisors. Radio logs point out that at 11:45 p.m. that evening, a workers sergeant within the district instructed officers on the scene that Rehill “has command.”
Within the interview, Rehill mentioned he understood he was the “preliminary vital incident commander,” and was the “go between” till a skilled vital incident commander — Workers Sgt. Jeff West — arrived on the scene later that evening.
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Rehill mentioned he relied closely on the expertise of the primary officers on the scene, who had been skilled in fast response methods for neutralizing lively shooters. “I don’t micromanage the (RCMP) members, and on the evening in query, I didn’t micromanage,” he mentioned. “I used to be listening so much.”
In the meantime, Rehill and different supervisors overseeing the response had bother figuring out the killer’s reproduction RCMP cruiser, based on fee’s summaries of the occasions on the primary evening.
Inside a half-hour of the capturing beginning, 911 name takers and RCMP members acquired reviews the killer’s automotive was a “decked and labelled RCMP automotive,” that it was “identical to a police automotive” with “lights and stuff, and it was ”a cop automotive“ that was white with stripes, however probably no roof lights.
Nonetheless, Rehill mentioned in his interview he heard from operators on the Truro communications centre that the killer, Gabriel Wortman, was a collector of decommissioned patrol automobiles, and Rehill mentioned “everybody” on the centre believed “we’re on the lookout for certainly one of these white, Ford Tauruses.”
In his interview with the inquiry, the workers sergeant mentioned he didn’t know till the subsequent morning that “this man had a completely marked police automotive that seemed equivalent to certainly one of ours that simply rolled off the lot.”
“I used to be in shock once I noticed the picture of the police automotive,” he mentioned.
This report by The Canadian Press was first printed April 27, 2022.
