N.S. shooting victim Joey Webber showed 'best and kindest' of humanity by stopping to help

In the hours after Joey Webber was killed while stopping to help at a crash between an RCMP officer and Nova Scotia's mass killer, his sister and father drove around the area looking for him as his partner repeatedly called his phone.

They wouldn't find out until that evening that Webber had been killed after randomly crossing paths with the gunman in Subenacadie, N.S., according to new details released this week by the commission leading the public inquiry into the April 2020 shooting rampage.

"Joey did what he thought was right — he stopped to help people he thought were in trouble," Rob Pineo, a lawyer whose firm is representing many of the victims' families, including Webber's, wrote in a Facebook post on Monday. "That kindness cost him his life as the monster who killed so many others also killed him."

The new documents detail what the Mass Casualty Commission believes happened to Webber the day he was killed by the gunman, who over 13 hours murdered 22 people, including a pregnant woman, and was driving a mock RCMP cruiser.

Webber, who was one of the gunman's last victims, was "a country boy who worked hard, was an amazing horseman, and, above all, loved his family," Pineo wrote. He said Webber was known in his community as a guy who would give anybody a hand when they needed one.

"Joey died a hero. His family can take that into their hearts to try to [soothe] the pain of his loss," Pineo said.

The morning of April 19, 2020, Webber, 36, was talking over the events from the night before in the community of Portapique, N.S., with his partner, Shanda McLeod, at their home in Wyses Corner, N.S. McLeod told him there was some "crazy person" there shooting people and burning homes.

"That kind of stuff doesn't happen here," McLeod recalled Webber saying.

The couple did not know about the gunman's mock cruiser. They went about their morning as usual, since "we didn't know that we were in danger or anything," McLeod said in a later police interview.

After kissing his partner and children, Webber drove out to get furnace oil in McLeod's mother's silver 2008 Ford Escape around 10 a.m., and arrived at the Esso gas stop in Milford, N.S., at 10:37 a.m. 

RCMP sent a tweet at 10:17 a.m., alerting the public for the first time the gunman was driving a replica cruiser.

On his way home, Webber made his way through Shubenacadie, and took the interchange where he came upon a crash between Const. Heidi Stevenson and the gunman.

He stopped and got out of his SUV, acting as a "Good Samaritan," according to witness Elizabeth Small, who had been driving by with her husband and stopped when they saw the cruisers collide.

"In an act that is consistent with only the best and kindest attributes of humanity, Joey Webber observed the accident, pulled over his vehicle and got out of his car," commission counsel Anna Mancini said Monday as she presented the documents about Shubenacadie.