Ex-HRP sergeant rips force’s response
HALIFAX — Halifax Regional Police “did not make any effort whatsoever to become involved” in the hunt for Gabriel Wortman, says a sergeant with the force’s emergency response team who retired after the Nova Scotia mass shootings.
This “despite the requests of the (non-commissioned officers) on the scene,” Charles Naugle, who was one of those NCOs, told the Mass Casualty Commission in an interview last September.
“It was a fight to get resources, it was a fight to get people called out.”
Naugle spent 32 years on the force before he retired, the last 15 as a member of the emergency response team. For the last two years, including April 2020 when the mass shootings took place, he was a team commander of the 28-member unit.
He was called to work before dawn on April 19, 2020.
‘THAT WAS DENIED’
Naugle said Sgt. Craig Robinson, who was working with HRP’s emergency response team the night before and briefed him on the morning of April 19, had asked the acting watch commander for more resources to search Wortman’s office and flat on Portland Street.
“He asked for extra members just to have enough to fill out a squad, and that was denied,” Naugle said.
The RCMP wanted Wortman’s Portland Street clinic searched, he said.
“We had information about explosives, we had information about all the firearms. We didn’t have enough to go in. We barely had enough to safely watch it.”
Naugle told the lawyers for the public inquiry that Halifax Regional Police “management’s probably going to be upset at me for coming in and saying this.”
He used the analogy of a house on fire in a tight subdivision.
“Your neighbour’s an idiot, you don’t get along with him, but either way, he’s your neighbour. His house is on fire and he’s out there with a garden hose and he’s trying to put out the fire. And you see that one, his place is burning down and, two, the flames are going to threaten you. Do you go over there with your garden hose and help him, or do you just say, never mind because you’re an idiot?”
‘AMPLE RESOURCES TO HELP’
Halifax Regional Police “had ample resources to help,” Naugle said.
“We didn’t make ... one effort whatsoever to stand those resources up, one in anticipation of a problem in Halifax, which everybody could see coming down the pipe, or standing them ... up and saying, ‘RCMP, here’s what we have to offer you. Do you want us to do the outer perimeter?’”
Halifax police have canine teams they didn’t bring in, he said, noting they might have been offered.
“Before I left, everybody knew my view of what occurred,” Naugle said. “Nobody’s ever done anything to sway my opinion of how we didn’t help.”
Members of HRP’s criminal investigation division were “asking to come in” on the morning of April 19 to mine for data on the mass killer.
“We had encounters with him,” Naugle said. “Two of the (emergency response team) members that were working that night, like Saturday night with Craig Robinson into Sunday morning, actually dealt with him down at the clinic in the ... blockedin police car occurrence. So, they knew him. We didn’t ... as far as I know, we weren’t doing anything to dig up information.”
Naugle noted the photo that investigators obtained of Wortman’s replica police car during the denturist’s murderous rampage likely came from family members of Lisa Banfield, the killer’s commonlaw spouse.
‘THEY WEREN’T CALLING ANYBODY OUT’
Naugle said both he and Robinson asked HRP duty officers to bring in more emergency response team members as the Mounties hunted the killer.
“It’s 7:48 (a.m. on April 19, 2020) when I got the phone call from (now inspector) Jeff Clarke saying they weren’t calling anybody out.”
Naugle said there were other resources his former force could have called in to work that day.
“Basically, we ran it as business as usual.”
Every officer working that day “knew this could blow up into something incredibly horrible,” Naugle said. “Not that it wasn’t horrible in that end of it, but we knew it wasn’t too far from becoming an incredible catastrophe in HRM. We (had) other resources we could have called in.”