Paramedics say N.S. mass shooting left lasting trauma but few changes at work

It is the children's frankness that has stayed with paramedics Melanie Lowe and Jeff Aucoin. 

The pair picked up kids whose parents had been killed in Portapique, N.S., the night of April 18, 2020. 

The children were likely in shock and could not yet fully understand what had just happened to them as they rode in the ambulance, the first responders recalled Monday at a public hearing of the Mass Casualty Commission in Dartmouth, N.S. 

Two boys had witnessed their parents' deaths, realized the gunman was trying to set their home on fire and escaped to a neighbour's where they hid with their two friends whose mother had been killed on her front lawn.

"The kids weren't holding back, everything they saw, heard, they said … Their voices were calm. It was just surreal, really. Having kids of my own, you empathize with those kids for sure," said Aucoin, an advanced care paramedic based in Amherst. 

Lowe, a primary care paramedic, said it was "nothing that any child should ever see, or hear or experience.

"And I have a harder time, I think, with it now than I did then." 

A panel of four Emergency Health Services (EHS) first responders spoke candidly about what it was like during the mass shooting that left 22 people dead, including a pregnant woman, and how it changed the way they approach their jobs. 

They also said their employer, EHS, did not do enough to support them in the aftermath or review its response to prepare for future emergencies. 

Aucoin said he and Lowe, the second team of paramedics to be dispatched, realized they were close to danger only after they approached a site at Portapique Beach Road. They could see four fires on the horizon and had little information from police or their dispatchers about what was happening. 

RCMP officers put the patient in the ambulance and banged on the door, telling them to leave. 

"Obviously we were too close, we should never have been sent there, but we didn't know," Aucoin said, adding that usually when police request an ambulance it's considered safe to proceed. 

"They just wanted to get those people out and safe as quickly as possible. But at the same time, I think we were put in a position of danger that we should never have been in. Because we have nothing — no bullet-proof vests, no weapons."

They parked farther away, but it turned out to be near the gunman's escape route. Aucoin said as they realized the shooter might be on foot, they felt like "sitting ducks" and decided to move again.