It’s a bright sunny morning, despite the cool breeze wafting through the air as a solitary figure looks down across the bay towards Portapique Beach taking in the peaceful tranquillity.
“This is why the people in this community live here,” says Tom Taggart, the area councillor for the Municipality of Colchester. “This is what they expected to see when they got up yesterday morning.”
Except it isn’t what area residents awoke to. Instead, it was the sound of helicopters circling the area, scores of RCMP vehicles and the ERT armoured trucks, flashing reds and blues.
And if you were close enough to where the day’s senseless tragedy began, the sights, sounds and smells of burning buildings, or police officers hollering for people to lock their doors and take cover in their basements.
And, in the midst of it all, a growing number of innocent victims gunned down when they opened the door to someone they knew as a longtime neighbour or as they ran in a futile attempt to escape the madman’s wrath.
“It’s unimaginable how people can go to bed in a community like this and have that kind of nightmare, houses burning and people beating on your door,” Taggart says.
And, to add to the madness, was the fact that the now-deceased gunman, Gabriel Wortman, was himself apparently clad in a police uniform and driving a mocked-up RCMP vehicle.
“If he showed up here in a police car, you’d let him in, wouldn’t you?” says nearby Bass River resident Daniel Yorke. “They didn’t have a chance.”
Yorke, a longtime bus driver in the area, knew a number of the victims from Sunday’s tragedy. He has driven their children to school for years and was a close friend to teacher Lisa McCully, a neighbour of Wortman’s and also one of his victims.
“I was friends with her forever,” Yorke says. “I’m really shocked about it … you don’t know your neighbours anymore. It’s scary … a whole different world.
“I didn’t sleep very well last night. It’s unbelievable.”
Like many others, Yorke says he first became aware something was amiss in the community when he got up at about 7 a.m. and saw the news circulating on Facebook. By 8 a.m. he could hear a helicopter circling overhead. As the day wore on, he began to hear rumours about potential victims, his school teacher friend among them.
Sadly, he eventually found out it was true.
“It’s a hard pill for me to swallow,” he says. “I was close friends with her.”
Christine Mills, who lives at the end of Bay Shore Road in Portapique, says she got up around 2 a.m. Sunday only to see headlights shining down their road. She spotted two RCMP vehicles and decided to wake up her partner, Rick Slocum.
“We sat for a bit and then he went back to bed,” she says, after assuming the police were likely responding to a rowdy beach party.
Then, at about 5 a.m. Mills got a Facebook message from her sister telling her there was an active shooter in the area and checking to see if they were OK.
“It felt uncomfortable for a while but when it came daylight, you felt a little bit better,” she says, especially because there were two RCMP cruisers about “40 steps” from her front door.
But little did they know the extent of what was going on. As more information became available, Mills began to wonder of the whereabouts of the then as-yet-unidentified shooter.
“You wonder, where the heck did he go? Where is he?”
And, given the reports that he was driving what appeared to be a police vehicle, “how many times did he drive by?” she says.
“It gives him an edge that’s for sure,” Mills says. “By the time you realize it’s not the police, it’s too late.”
Taggart, a lifelong resident in the area, has to stop to catch his breath when asked about the identities of some of the victims
“I’m at a loss for words,” he says. “I’m not normally an emotional person.”
But these aren’t normal times.
Stopping for a moment to take a cellphone call, Taggart ends the conversation and looks up.
“Believe it or not, that was the London Times. The New York Times was calling me by 10 o’clock yesterday morning,” he says. “Every time I answered the phone yesterday people said: ‘I hope you’re doing OK.’
I was sitting looking out the window. I can’t even imagine the aftermath, how people are dealing with this.”
Nearby, back on Wharf Road in Bass River, where you can look up along the beach to where the nightmare began, Yorke was expressing a similar sentiment.
“I woke up yesterday morning, I didn’t see this coming on the horizon,” he says. “It will be a long time getting over this.”
