FRANK MAGAZINE TODAY
ANATOMY OF A COVER-UP: ONSLOW-BELMONT
'No wonder they missed everything because they were running and shooting at the same time'
by Paul Palango
One of the most confounding mysteries of modern times is the inner workings of a vast and insidious cover-up. Debunkers are quick to say that to pull off a massive cover-up would require countless numbers of players. It’s impossible, they like to say. Not at all feasible. Too many moving parts. Conspiracy theory. That’s one way of looking at it.
What the debunkers overlook is the power of self-interest, group think and tribalism.
Welcome to an anatomy of a cover-up. In the context of the larger event this slice of the cover-up is a puny thing, but in the bigger picture it is emblematic of the problems we as a society face when it comes to holding accountable public and private institutions, especially the police.
One of the most inexplicable and baffling episodes during Gabriel Wortman’s 13.5-hour murder spree during which 22 innocent Nova Scotians were murdered occurred when two RCMP constables apparently mistook one of their own for Wortman and shot up the Onslow-Belmont fire hall.
It was a crazy moment in an insane weekend. A denturist, of all professions, went postal during the evening of Saturday April 18. Thirteen people soon died, although it’s still not known if he killed them all. Due to conflicting timelines, there is some doubt about who actually killed Corrie Ellison. Was it the likely suspect Gabriel Wortman? Or a panicky Mountie? Considering the already established evidence, that is a reasonable question.
The next day, Wortman was allowed to roam the open roads of Northern and Central Nova Scotia and collected nine more victims. During the last hour of his second spree the curious incident at the fire hall took place. Bullets, shrapnel and debris flew everywhere. The damage to buildings, equipment and an LED billboard was more than $40,000 and was promptly paid by taxpayers to taxpayers. The wreckage to the psyche of the souls involved was priceless.
An inquiry of sorts was conducted by former Nova Scotia judge Felix Cacchione, director of the “independent” Serious Incident Response Team. The word independent is given scare quotes here because those in the public who have been paying attention understand that Cacchione has issued two reports about that weekend that are built on falsities. In any event, on February 26, after 10 months of “investigation,” Cacchione issued a report on the incident. He found that the two constables, Terry Brown and Dave Melanson -- who, of course, are unnamed in his report -- were so stressed by what all they had seen that morning and the high stakes of bringing down a heinous killer that they could be forgiven for acting like any other citizen in a similar situation. Cacchione ruled that the two Mounties did not use their firearms in a careless manner and that they had a lawful excuse for discharging their guns. No criminal charges were warranted, Cacchione wrote.
But as the public should have learned by now, Cacchione has proven to be not much more than a competent stenographer for his ability to scribble down dictation from the highest levels of the RCMP.
For example, he misdescribed what had actually happened in the last few minutes of Wortman’s life. Cacchione conflated two incidents into one in that report. He stated that an RCMP canine officer identified Wortman at a gas pump at the Irving Big Stop in Enfield. After some indecision, the canine officer and another RCMP Emergency Response Team member confronted Wortman and shot and killed him. Video recordings of the incident obtained by Frank Magazine clearly show that didn’t happen. Wortman was seen by Mounties at the Petro Canada station in Elmsdale and shot by Mounties in what appeared to be an execution at the Big Stop.
Cacchione, the RCMP, the federal and provincial governments, nevertheless, continue to stand behind the SIRT reports even though they appear to be little more than convenient fiction intended to shield the epic disaster that is the RCMP these days. Judging by its lack of reportage or commentary on the matter, the mainstream and some alternative media potentates see not much wrong with all that.
How could this happen, you wonder?
'While they were running, they started firing their guns'
Seventeen months after the event, a new and important witness has emerged who can help us shine a light into the inner workings of the ongoing cover-up which we have had the privilege of documenting in real time.
His name is Jerome Breau. He’s 51 years old and lives in a little community called Valley, just east of Truro. Not The Valley, just Valley. It serves as home to all kinds of decent everyday citizens and a flock of police officers from both the Truro force and the RCMP.
Breau lives in a beautiful house at the end of a cul-de-sac. He’s a machinist at Pratt & Whitney at Halifax’s Pearson International Airport. He’s not exactly a daring guy. He’s precise. You can tell by his neatly kept house. He drives a Toyota Prius.
“I didn’t want to say anything before because of what happened to all the families. I didn’t want to irritate anyone,” Breau said, explaining what changed his attitude. “After I read the SIRT report, I couldn’t believe what they said. What was particularly hard for me to digest is him saying that nobody else would have acted differently in this kind of situation. I am not trained as an RCMP officer and I’m not trained with weaponry. I am not trained about the criminal mind. The police are supposed to have the upper hand when dealing with a difficult situation…. That didn’t happen.”
He knows because he was at the firehall on that day, the closest person to the action.
That Sunday morning, Breau set out to do what he normally does on a Sunday morning; go for a leisurely 25-minute or so drive, grab a coffee at the Tim Horton’s at Masstown,
and then spend some time evaluating the latest wrecks in two auto scrap yards located in the area. Rebuilding cars is his hobby.
The route Breau took from his home skirted the northern edge of Truro. It ran roughly parallel to the highway 104 expressway near where Highway 102 runs south to Halifax. He ended up on the old combined highway 2 and 4 in Central Onslow heading toward the Onslow-Belmont fire hall about seven kilometres to the west.
Breau had no appreciation what was going on in the wider world around him. He had heard on the CBC that there was “an active shooter” situation going on in Portapique, farther to the west but had no sense of any imminent danger.
“I didn’t really think about what that meant,” Breau said. “I figured they had some guy trapped in a house or something. I drove that whole way and didn’t see a police car until I went past the (Central Colchester Junior High) school. I could see him coming around the bend and I slowed down a bit.
““The cop car looked different,” said Breau. “RCMP cars in Nova Scotia don’t have push bars on them, I knew that. It looked like a town car (Truro police) because it had a push bar but when it passed by I could see that it had the RCMP stickers on the side. I just kept going.”
Breau had thought ever since that he had crossed the path of Gabriel Wortman as he fled the area after killing his latest victims, VON nurses Kristin Beaton and Heather O’Brien on Plains Road in Debert. It wasn’t Wortman but likely a Mountie from New Brunswick called in to help out the local Mounties, who had mysteriously kept the nearby Truro police out of the loop.
We know from surveillance cameras capturing Breau’s movements that he met that police car on Highway 2 at about 10:17 a.m. He had just missed Wortman who had taken that very route and at that moment was actually driving through Truro. He had been captured driving on the Esplanade at 10:16 a.m. passing a pair of unaware strangers walking on the sidewalk to his right. Wortman headed south from that point and soon killed his last three victims: RCMP Constable Heidi Stevenson, Good Samaritan Joey Webber and fellow denturist Gina Goulet.
Breau drove for seven more kilometres west on Highway 2. At that point on his left was a large building, McLellan Machine Shop. On his right was the Onslow-Belmont fire hall, which was being used at that point as an emergency shelter for three people evacuated from Portapique the night before, including Corrie Ellison’s father, Richard. Up ahead, Breau noticed something unusual.
“I saw this unmarked Ford Taurus come over the crest of the hill. When it got about 800 feet in front of me, it went over the centre line and took about 40 per cent of my lane and came to a stop,” Breau said.
Thinking it was a traffic stop, Breau eased his car up to near where the police car was stopped. He rolled down the window expecting it was a routine traffic stop.
“The two guys got out of the car and were dressed in dark SWAT gear,” Breau said. “They both put their rifles on top of the door and were looking through their scopes.”
He thought the two Mounties were aiming their weapons at him.
“I knew that they were looking for a bald guy like me, but I was driving a Prius. I knew that was not what they were looking for,” he said. “I put my hands up, but then I realized that they were looking past me into the firehall parking lot. I could see an RCMP car there and someone standing near the car.”
Breau said the two Mounties then retreated briefly behind the car where they seemed to be conferring, perhaps on the radio with someone. Breau had his window down, expecting to be questioned by the police. He couldn’t hear what they were saying, but more importantly, he didn’t hear them shouting out any commands or, for that matter, anything else. He was about to try to edge by the police car and get out of harm’s way, when one of the Mounties waved him to pass by and the two of them began running toward the firehall.
“While they were running, they started firing their guns,” Breau said. “One guy fired three times while he was running and then, I think, the other one fired three times. I was close enough that I could feel the percussion from the guns in the car. No wonder they missed everything because they were running and shooting at the same time.”
The Mounties were aiming at an EMO worker who was wearing a lime green vest with orange epaulettes. Inside the RCMP cruiser was Constable Dave Gagnon, who was from the Pictou detachment. The shots missed the men and the cruiser but hit just about everything else. Bullets went through a door and the wall striking a fire truck and lodging in its engine. People inside were narrowly missed. One bullet hit a marble monument and the chips exploded into shrapnel causing more than two dozen additional holes in the building.
Breau continued on his way. He said he tried to flag down about four oncoming cars but was ignored by all. He went to the Tim Horton’s in Masstown, called his wife and some friends, visited the wreckers and decided to head home via Highway 104. With all the turmoil going on, he didn’t see a Mountie vehicle until he came to an emergency vehicle turnaround lane just west of Exit 15, the only exit to Truro, Halifax and the South Shore.
There were about a half dozen unmarked cars and an ERT truck parked in the median. The police weren’t stopping and searching vehicles. It was the same story on Highway 102 to Halifax, others said. The RCMP were parked and waiting for something to happen. Nothing proactive was taking place.
“I said to one of the cops, ‘Hey, look, there was a shootout at the fire hall,” Breau recalled. “I’m basically talking right through him. He’s listening to me but he’s not really listening. Hey, buddy, there’s a shooting at the fire hall. They were all strung out. I got the sense they didn’t know what was going on and they were very disorganized. Then I heard on his radio a message: ‘He’s in a grey Mazda.’ They all got in their cars and were making U-turns and headed to the ramp toward Halifax.”
Breau headed for home, still wanting to tell some Mountie his story. Eventually, as he got to Valley, he saw a metallic tan Chevrolet Suburban coming out of a McDonald’s drive-thru. He pulled over, collared the Mountie in the vehicle and told him his story. Breau went home. He didn’t know if he had seen anything important or momentous, but little did he realize that he might well have.
Today, there are police everywhere on this case: subject officers, witness officers, internal investigators, private investigators and as lobbyists promoting and defending the police, overtly and covertly, on the airwaves.
Some are objective, but when it comes to events that might tarnish the badge, even police agree most are not. If they can find a way on either side of a case to protect “the thin blue line,” that’s precisely what they do.
Breau experienced how this works.
The Mountie at McDonald’s apparently relayed Breau’s information to investigators and that night Breau received a call from a SIRT investigator.
“The next day he comes over to my work. His name was Doucette,” Breau said. “He immediately started downplaying the situation. He asked me where I was driving, how many shots, that sort of thing. I’d say he spent maybe 15 minutes with me, including all the chit chat in between. He wrote some things down. It was all very brief. Pretty nonchalant.”
Breau said the SIRT investigator indicated that there wasn’t much of anything special in what he had witnessed: ‘Yeah, that’s pretty well what everybody saw.’ “
Soon afterward, another Mountie investigator from British Columbia showed up and invited Breau to attend at the Bible Hill detachment office. This Mountie was from the Hazardous Occurrence Investigation Team.
“It seemed to me that they were more like damage control people,” Breau remembered. ‘They were asking me about my mental health. They asked about where the officers hands were that day and questions like: ‘Did you hear them speak?’ They were adamant about whether I heard them screaming orders (to those in the fire hall parking lot) but I told them I had my window down and they didn’t scream nothing. They were all but insinuating that these two guys had screamed ‘stop’ to the other guys at the fire hall.”
You could all but envision how the police minds were working. If they were looking to discredit Breau’s story, the easy hook was that he had his engine on, how could he possibly hear what was being said outside? The answer to that one was simple: he was out in the country and his vehicle was a noiseless Prius.
Next came an investigator working for a law office. Where they got Breau’s name from was unknown. This investigator was a former Mountie. Other investigators working for lawyers are former police officers, including one who had spent 39 years in the RCMP.
“That investigator was telling me that it appeared that the police officer who was being shot at had fired back at the two officers and had hit the LED sign,” Breau said.
That didn’t happen. Constable Gagnon didn’t fire a shot. He got out of his cruiser and had his hands in the air while hiding behind his cruiser. Having been shot at by his own, Gagnon never recovered from the event and has apparently left the RCMP.
Charlie Hoyt and Deputy Fire Chief Darrell Currie
How the LED sign got hit has long been a conundrum. It sits on the western edge of the fire hall property and seemingly out of the line of fire. Figuring out what happened to the sign is a key to unravelling the true story.
Late one Thursday afternoon, my research buddy, Chad, and I picked Breau up in Valley and drove to the fire hall to go over his story word by word and inch by inch. After 17 months there were a few gaps, but not fatal ones. They were reparable.
For example, Breau had problems placing exactly where the police car had stopped on the roadway and where the two officers were positioned. In his mind the RCMP car blocking the road was beside a garbage can and the LED sign. The positioning couldn’t explain how the Mounties managed to fire a round into it from the west, if they were south and east of the sign, as Breau initially recalled.
Somehow, the two Mounties had to be positioned west of where Breau remembered.
Breau wasn’t the only one to see what happened. Across the road from the firehall lived Sharon McLellan. She is the most famous witness by far, featured in countless news stories, podcasts and the Fifth Estate documentary on the subject.
We went over the McLellan’s house and introduced the two witnesses to each other.
McLellan’s and Breau’s versions did not mesh completely. That day she was in her kitchen talking on the phone when she saw what was going on.
Both McLellan and a neighbour across the road who lived immediately west of the firehall recall that the unmarked police car was stopped at the foot of the neighbour’s driveway, west of the LED sign.
By pure coincidence, another new witness entered the picture that day, someone who had never been interviewed by anyone. He was 69-year-old Charlie Hoyt, a retiree, who lives a couple of kilometres to the east of McLellan just over the municipal boundary in Central Onslow.
Like Breau, Hoyt had gone out for a Sunday drive that morning and, according to surveillance video from the Onslow Belmont fire hall was driving his half-ton a few seconds behind Breau.
The one thing that Hoyt remembered was that the police were set up west of the LED sign and were aiming their Colt-C8 rifles toward the fire hall parking lot. But time appears to have taken a toll on Hoyt’s memory because he places the Mounties farther west, almost 300 metres from the fire hall. The point is: he remembers them being west of the LED sign.
After leaving the scene Hoyt headed for the Tim Horton’s in Debert, which is located just south of where Kristen Beaton and Heather O’Brien were murdered. The police had the roads blocked by that time. Hoyt didn’t want to go back home because of what was going on at the fire hall, so he drove along Highway 104 to Truro to get his coffee. He saw all the Mounties on the highway along the way and was even stopped and given a cursory inspection by the Mounties.
“They just waved me through,” Hoyt said. “They didn’t even check inside my car or anything. What if the gunmen was kidnapping me?”
Enter Deputy Fire Chief Darrell Currie.
When we told him our findings, he suggested that we go for a drive and approach the fire hall from the west, like Constables Brown and Melanson did that morning, and see for ourselves what they could see. So that is what we did.
We drove east down Highway 2, past a farm field and two houses and then suddenly out of nowhere appeared the fire hall, having been hidden by a large hedgerow and the LED sign.
The SIRT report by Cacchione stated that the two officers (SO1 and SO2):
As they neared the Onslow Fire Hall, they saw (the EMO worker), a man wearing a yellow and orange reflective vest standing by the driver's side door of a fully marked RCMP vehicle parked in front of the fire hall. Attempts made by SO2, using both the mobile and portable radios, to notify other officers of what SO1 (Brown) and SO2 (Melanson) were seeing were unsuccessful due to the heavy volume of radio traffic. When SO1 identified themself as police and ordered AP2 to show his hands, (the EMO worker) did not do as ordered but instead ducked behind the police vehicle and then popped up before running into the fire hall.
As Currie had suggested, that was an impossibility. There was no way that the two officers driving down Highway 2 could have recognized the situation that quickly. The RCMP cruiser was backed up to a door and surrounded by safety cones. If one stopped at the neighbour’s driveway to the west of the fire hall, one had a clear line – through a gap in the LED sign’s structure – to see the police car parked in front of the garage door.
Did the Mounties try to fire through that gap, missed and hit the LED sign?
A third thing that largely went unnoticed in Cacchione’s report was that the two Mounties were aware that Wortman was wearing an orange safety vest.
As Cacchione put it in his February report: “Through a statement given to SO1 (Brown) by the killer's intimate partner, that the killer was wearing an orange vest.”
There are a few problems with that. Of all the almost 1,000 Mounties in Nova Scotia, Constable Terry Brown purportedly interviewed Wortman’s common-law wife, Lisa Banfield, when she purportedly came out of the woods at 6:30 a.m. and she told him that Wortman was wearing an orange vest. Now Terry Brown was hunting down Wortman, too? Why weren’t all the Mounties on Highway 104 being asked to do more?
Also: the vest was green, not orange.
“It was lime green,” said Sharon McLellan. “There was so little orange on it, you couldn’t possibly see it.”
The two Mounties said they happened upon Wortman, but did they? It seems clear that something else happened. They stopped short of the firehall. The LED sign was between them and the real RCMP cruiser.
They shot from far away like snipers.
Once again, it raises the question about a shoot-to-kill order. Video recordings of the shooting of Gabriel Wortman suggest he was killed on sight by the two Mounties in Enfield.
All this raises the questions about whether the two Mounties at the firehall were part of a special unit operating outside normal lines? Other Mounties appear to have been kept out of the loop.
Finally, there is this. Breau remembers hearing a RCMP radio transmission that Wortman was in a grey Mazda.
He was in a grey Mazda. Breau didn’t even realize that. He just blurted out what he remembered. He stole it from Gina Goulet after he murdered her. He was seen in it at the Petro Can station at Elmsdale, as videos have shown.
Cacchione, however, said in media interviews after the videos were released that the Mounties did not identify Wortman as the driver of the Mazda at Elmsdale. That’s why we need all the communications records made public. Therein lies the truth, that is, unless such evidence has been “pasteurized” in RCMP labs, as sources indicate has been the case.
What matters here is that all those police and former police poked enough holes in Breau’s and McLellan’s stories so that they weren’t a factor in Cacchione’s final report. One of the obvious flaws in Breau’s story was that he said the police were driving an unmarked Ford Taurus. It was actually a Nissan Altima. McLellan thought the same car was a Hyundai. They also differed on the precise spot where the police car stopped in the road.
Hoyt, who was never interviewed, had a third place where the car stopped.
But all of what they saw and heard was relevant. Their interrogators worked to develop and exploit the weaknesses in their stories, not the strengths. They then wrote them off as unreliable and defaulted to the unchallenged police version of events. That’s their big trick. Their go-to move to save their own bacon.
I talked to a number of law enforcement people about all this. They all agreed that a proper investigation into what happened at Onslow-Belmont never occurred.
As one put it: “If there is no investigation, there is no crime.”
A corrections officer said: “If I take my gun out of its holster for any reason, I’m spending the rest of my day doing paperwork.”
A friendly, sympathetic Mountie who reviewed the evidence with me said that in his opinion there must be an investigation into what he believed was negligent and illegal behaviour by the constables at the fire hall.
“Maybe the best way to cut through all this is for some citizen to put their feet to the fire, step up to the plate and lay a private criminal charge,” the Mountie said. “That way, the Crown prosecutor will be forced to take over the case or dismiss. Make them publicly show their hand.”
To the Mass Casualty Commission: Get on a bus, drive east down Highway 2 toward the Onslow Belmont fire hall and ask yourself these three questions:
1) The two Mounties seemed to have advance knowledge about the police car being parked at the fire hall. If so, who told them and when and what were their orders?
2) Why were they firing from cover, through the LED sign, as if they were snipers?
3) Did Gabriel Wortman, who had passed by at 10:07 a.m., alert the Mounties to the car as a way of slowing down the hit-team he likely rightly suspected were dogging him?
Oh yeah, the RCMP has insisted that Wortman didn’t have a phone or radio, and didn’t communicate with them during the spree.
paulpalango@protonmail.com
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