'We were 100 per cent sure.' Mounties mistakenly thought N.S. gunman had shot himself
“…..Among other things, the inquiry has been asked to determine why it took police 13 hours to stop the shooter, and one theory holds that the police investigating the shootings in Portapique concluded the rampage had come to an end on the first night.
"That seems to be the basis for their assumption that he'd killed himself and nobody seems to have even remotely considered the idea that he somehow managed to leave Portapique undetected," Scott said.
The first RCMP officer to arrive at the scene, Const. Stuart Beselt, told a commission lawyer that he believed the killer shot himself after RCMP Emergency Response Team officers called his name using loudspeakers.
Beselt, in an interview conducted on July 22, 2021, said he heard “one loud crack" of gunfire as he and other officers were being sent home early on April 19, 2020.
"And I'm like, 'He just did himself in the woods,'" Beselt told commission lawyer Roger Burrill. "We heard one last loud crack and it was like, 'Nah, he just knows the gig's up. He just shot himself' .... I felt like the situation was over. They'll find him in the woods somewhere."
Beselt wasn’t the only Mountie who guessed wrong about the killer’s fate that night.
Const. Aaron Patton, one of three officers who advanced into the neighbourhood within minutes of arriving at the scene at 10:25 p.m., also said he later heard what he believed was one, loud rifle shot as police called out to the killer.
Up to then, there had been no single gunshots, he said in an interview with an RCMP officer on April 23, 2020. “It was always multiple gunshots …. It was never just one, so we were 100 per cent sure that that was him killing himself in the woods,” Patton said…..
……You see how connecting the dots of all of these assumptions, all of these little errors, even if they're understandable, you start to get a view of how this guy was able to roam unchecked throughout the province for 13 hours," Scott said.”
