RCMP commanding officer explains why he dismissed marked car evidence in N.S. shooting

One of the commanding officers who led the initial RCMP response to Nova Scotia's mass shooting says he momentarily thought a fellow officer might be the perpetrator behind the killings after a report of a marked police cruiser at the scene.

Steve Halliday, a retired staff sergeant, testified Tuesday at the inquiry examining the shootings that he was able to quickly discount that theory, and instead believed the vehicle connected to the gunman was in fact a decommissioned or old RCMP car.

Halliday is one of a number of officers who have testified at the inquiry that they didn't imagine during the early hours of the rampage that the vehicle being driven by Gabriel Wortman, who killed 22 people on April 18-19, 2020, was nearly identical to a real police cruiser.

He also outlined what he knew of the emergency alert system, and what information led him and other officers to conclude the gunman remained in the community of Portapique, N.S., hours after the shooting began, when in fact he had escaped and would resume killing people the next morning.

A new document released Tuesday by the commission conducting the inquiry details the RCMP command structure and decisions over the 13 hours the gunman was active, and lays out what each officer did and when.

At 10:35 p.m. on April 18, risk manager Staff Sgt. Brian Rehill called Halliday at home to tell him about a likely active shooter situation in Portapique, where multiple people had died, fires were set around the community and a police car was possibly involved.

As the risk manager on duty at the Operational Communications Centre in Bible Hill, N.S., Rehill had been in charge of the unfolding incident from the moment victim Jamie Blair called 911 at 10:01 p.m. She said her husband, Greg, had been shot by Wortman, a neighbour. She also said there had been an "RCMP car" in their yard.

She herself was then shot and killed by the gunman.

Halliday said Tuesday that Rehill told him Dave Lilly, a now-retired RCMP sergeant, had been brought up as being possibly connected since he owned property near Portapique.

"My first thought was 'uh-oh,'" Halliday told the inquiry, adding he was worried Lilly had his marked cruiser with him in Portapique and had done something "heinous" in the community.

"I was really concerned that this could be the case," Halliday said.

According to the inquiry documents, at 10:55 p.m. Halliday called Lilly directly. Lilly was at his cottage, which wasn't in Portapique, and it became clear he wasn't involved in the active shooter situation.

Halliday said once he realized Lilly wasn't involved, the idea of the marked cruiser morphed to a decommissioned or older model of police car. He said from his experience, when people are caught up in traumatic situations their information can be "wrongly worded or misinterpreted."

"That factored into my thought process at that time," Halliday said.