Siouxie

Shocking..... The RCMP say a suspect wanted in connection with a shooting incident involving several victims in Portapique, N.S. is now in custody.
He dressed in clothes to look like a police officer.. and drove a vehicle resembling a police vehicle initially.........

https://beta.canada.com/pmn/news-pmn...-034898fed2d2/
https://atlantic.ctvnews.ca/suspect-...otia-1.4902687

caretaker

Apparently it started last night at 10:30. The RCMP will probably start releasing information when they think they've located all the victims. It's on the CTV News right now.
https://globalnews.ca/news/6838880/r...ortapique-n-s/
There's a news conference scheduled for 5pm EST. I'm afraid it could be grim if they're waiting that long. Possibly allowing time to notify next of kin.
Indeed, a leak by a local says several people killed. Apparently he was setting fire to cottages last night as well.

confused_uk

At least 10 people have died and they expect the number to be higher. 1 police officer has died and not all the victims were known to the shooter. The shooter is also deceased.

Not something you expect to happen here, terrible.

caretaker

Now at least 13 dead. Way to **** up a week-end.

scilly

Number killed now up to 17, according to the National Post on line .............. 1 RCMP officer killed, another in hospital with non-life threatening injuries.

Danny B

I am always curious why these bastards kill random people? Once they are shot dead, no one will ever know the motive. That bloke who killed 50 people from his hotel room in Vegas, no one knows why to this day. Mental health, wanted to go out in a blaze of glory? who the hell knows.

caretaker

It will take them some time to go through the burned houses looking for more corpses. Hopefully they don't find them. The bastard planned it out pretty well, knowing that if fire fighters came he could shoot them, and if they stayed away because of the active shooter situation, he would have more time to move while police searched that area. After a house has burned to the ground finding a body can be challenging, but I saw a yellow lab on the news, so probably a cadaver dog.

Siouxie

He was a property owner (rental properties) as well as a denturist with a nice log house.. what his reasons or thoughts behind his actions could have been I doubt we will ever know.. some he had a connection to, others none - perhaps witnesses to his actions or he was just totally out of his skull.
Tragic.. just terrible.

caretaker

I've been avoiding looking at the news since I got up, but just checked and the death toll is up to over 19.

scilly

It's a lovely, very rural area where he lived, popular with campers and cottagers. It's also not far away from one of the NS ski areas, Wentworth.

There is to be a virtual remembrance on Friday

scrubbedexpat091

If the reports he had a replica RCMP car and uniform are true, certainly seems he had this planned out well in advance, hopefully he left behind some evidence that can help police determine a motive. But seems often these shooters don't leave behind why they did it.

Tumbling_Dice

Terrible stuff. My colleagues and I had a call from our regional director today to see if we were ok, which was a nice touch. I was a little shocked at how shocked my colleagues were even though they were in no way directly or indirectly affected by the actual events. Growing up in Northern Ireland this sort of awful news happened too often and I guess it is testament to Canadian society that this sort of thing is such an outlier.

scilly

It definitely is an outlier for Canadians, always has been.

There have mass killings in the past, but this is by far the largest number of people killed, and a mix of apparently known and random.

Offhand, the ones that come to mind for me after over 50 years here, are the Montreal murders when a young man killed 14 young women, all engineering students at Ecole Polytechnique. 1989

The Vernon massacre when an estranged husband killed 9 members of his wife's family. 1996

The Mayerthorpe murders when 4 RCMP guys were killed in what was basically an ambush 2005

Moncton killing of 3 RCMP and wounding of 2 others 2014

Fredericton shooting of 4 people, including 2 police officers 2018



There have been others, but none as either large or involving deliberate shootings of police officers, and those are the ones that stick in mind.

But I think the difference for us vs the US or Ireland, is that we have never had multiple killings several times within one year, or within a short period of time. It's still very much a very uncommon event.

I am excluding here the gang wars in Surrey BC and Toronto.

Siouxie

I've just been reading about some of the victims - people from all walks of life.. ordinary people.. and there are more to come, they say - some people still missing....

Tragic.

Paul_Shepherd

Yes, this is terrible, and to happen in one of the most unlikely of places....

In the states...yes we have sadly come to expect it with their ridiculous gun laws or lack of, but for this to happen in a quiet, friendly, salt of the earth NS village, we will never know what drove this nut job to cold blooded mass murder. Deeply saddening.