At an update on the April mass shootings in Nova Scotia, Superintendent Darren Campbell said that hundreds of officers and forensics specialists from all over the country and in the U.S. are working on the case.
He says they are looking at everything.
“Every piece of information that we retrieve and receive is analyzed. It’s fact-checked and corroborated in order to assess the weight, validity, and value of this information. There is no room for speculation. To get it right takes time.”
Campbell said new information includes the fact that the shooter did not use his replica vehicle to pull over any of the victims and that, Constable Heidi Stephenson did not ram his vehicle, which received more damage than hers did.
“She bravely engaged the gunman and that there was an exchange of gunfire between Constable Stephenson and the gunman. As a final point here, Constable Stephenson and Constable Morrison, who had been shot earlier in the morning, just prior to the contact between the gunman and Constable Stephenson, they were both wearing their soft and their hard body armour.”
The RCMP have also confirmed that the shooter did have two retired RCMP officer in his family but that they were estranged and did not help him in any way and another retired officer from a different police force also did not help him in any way.
Superintendent Campbell also said they had a problem tracing the shooter’s vehicles because he had them registered under a corporate name.
“Registering those vehicles under a corporation name made it difficult for us to determine which vehicles he actually had registered to him. Whether he did that by design or whether there was a benefit to him to register them under a business name, that’s a question that, more than likely, only the gunman can answer.”
He says they became aware that former police vehicles associated with him were registered under that company name on the evening of April 18th but that it did make it more difficult to discover.
Campbell says they are mindful that some information they release may be distressing to the families, so they update them before telling the public.
