Warning: The following story contains graphic and violent details that will disturb some readers.
HALIFAX—Ultimately, it may have been a bullet wound inflicted by a police officer in her final moments that proved the downfall of the gunman in the worst mass killing in Canadian history.
It was a poignant possibility that came to light Monday, as the public inquiry into the Nova Scotia massacre filled in some of the details of an encounter that left a Mountie and a Good Samaritan dead, and two cars in flames.
Const. Craig Hubley, one of the officers who eventually fatally shot killer Gabriel Wortman, has said in his police report that when he pulled up to the Irving Big Stop gas station in Enfield, NS, on April 19, 2020, his attention was drawn to the individual at the opposite pump because of the bruise on the man’s forehead and the unattended trickle of blood running down his face.
As Hubley looked closer, he recognized the man police had been hunting — the 51-year-old denturist who had been terrorizing northern Nova Scotia for the past 13 hours.
Hubley and Const. Ben MacLeod, who had been riding with him, shot the gunman, ending a rampage during which Wortman had, while at times wearing a Mountie uniform and driving a replica RCMP car, killed 22 people in four communities, beginning in Portapique.
But the wound that alerted Hubley appears likely to have come from the gun of Const. Heidi Stevenson — one of the killer’s last victims — in a face-to-face shootout not 40 minutes earlier.
On Monday, the Mass Casualty Commission inquiry released the results of its investigation into the portions of the massacre that occurred near Shubenacadie, NS — the deaths of Stevenson and bystander Joey Webber, as well as the wounding of RCMP Const. Chad Morrison.
The details are by turns inspiring and grim: a police officer attempting to face down a known killer and a passerby rushing to offer help at the scene of an accident, juxtaposed against a man coldly gunning down victims at close range.
Stevenson, a 23-year member of the RCMP and mother of two, had been driving to meet her fellow constable, Morrison, just north of the cloverleaf intersection of highways 2 and 224, based on reports that the killer’s replica Mountie cruiser had been spotted traveling south along Highway 2.
Morrison, spotting an RCMP car approaching, radioed Stevenson, asking if the car he saw was hers. Stevenson, thinking he’d spotted her car de ella, mistakenly said it was.
As the car pulled alongside him, Morrison realized too late it was the gunman they’d been hunting. The gunman pointed a handgun through the driver’s-side window and shot Morrison, hitting him in the arms and chest — the bullet to the chest stopped by Morrison’s body armor.
Morrison hit the gas and sped off south down Highway 2.
“I’m shot! I’m shot!” he yelled over the radio, according to police radio transcripts.
Stevenson, hearing his distress call, raced to his location. The gunman, following behind Morrison, saw Stevenson’s car coming up the ramp through the cloverleaf intersection in the opposite direction.
He swerved his car—the replica RCMP car with a front push bar—into the oncoming traffic lane, hitting Stevenson’s vehicle head-on.
The commission’s evidence suggests that Stevenson got out of her car and exchanged gunfire with the killer. The magazine of her RCMP-issued Smith & Wesson pistol held 15 9-mm rounds; forensic investigators found the casings for 14 of those rounds near the driver’s side of her car.
One of those bullets, or a fragment of it, struck the gunman in the upper-right side of his head. Post-mortem, it was determined that the wound caused a skull fracture, which was non-debilitating. Bullet fragments pulled from the wound “shared class characteristics consistent with having been fired from Const. Stevenson’s pistol,” said commission counsel Anna Mancini.
After the exchange of gunfire, the gunman approached Stevenson, now lying on the ground by her car, and shot her at close range, before taking her pistol and magazines.
On that same morning, Joey Webber had been at home with his partner, Shanda MacLeod, and their children. MacLeod had read the news from Portapique from the night before.
“There’s some crazy person out there shooting people, burning things down,” she told him.
Webber was taken back, saying “that kind of stuff doesn’t happen here.”
Then he left their home in his silver SUV on a routine errand, to buy some furnace oil.
By the time he approached the cloverleaf intersection, Wortman had already crashed his car into Stevenson’s, exchanged gunfire and killed the RCMP officer.
That was the scene which Webber stumbled upon—an apparent accident between two police cars. According to witnesses, he was seen running toward the crashed cars, presumably to help.
Witnesses described the gunman forcing Webber into the back seat of the replica police car.
Gerald Whitman, watching from his residence nearby, called 911 to report the collision and the gunshots. In a statement to police later, Whitman said: “Buddy got him to go into the back seat of the cruiser that’s facing down the ramp … After he got him in there he reached back in and you could hear the gun firing again, so, I don’t know if he shot him in the back seat, but then the next thing he did was he opened up the trunk, he set the car on fire and then he jumped in the gray SUV.”
Another witness, Dean Martin, took a photo of the gunman before he left the scene.
“I have never seen someone who looked so casual in my life,” he said later in a statement to police. “It’s like, he wasn’t getting excited, he wasn’t. He was just kinda taking it out, like it was an average day.”
Forensic evidence determined that Webber was shot in the back seat of the killer’s replica RCMP cruiser before it was set on fire. Webber’s DNA was later found on the gunman’s boots and on his Ruger Mini-14 rifle.
After killing Webber, the gunman burned Stevenson’s car as well before taking Webber’s silver SUV and leaving the scene.
The Mass Casualty Commission inquiry continues Wednesday.
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