Residents describe being at ground zero of Moncton shooting
Posted June 5, 2014 9:03 pm.
This article is more than 5 years old.
Dewayne Beers said it was shocking to look out his window on his usually tranquil, dead-end street in Moncton and see an RCMP officer bleeding and being supported as she was helped into a police SUV.
He saw the bloodied female Mountie taken away Wednesday evening from a police vehicle with a shattered window across from his home on Penrose Street.
It’s not clear if she was one of the two wounded officers or one of the three Mounties killed after a gunman went on a shooting spree in the north end of the city of 69,000.
“It’s quite traumatic,” he said Thursday. “We stayed here because it’s safe to raise a family here.”
Beers said the car she was sitting in was still parked across from his house on Penrose as of Thursday afternoon — a stark reminder of a nightmarish and sleepless evening the day before.
Daniel St. Louis, a Moncton commercial photographer, was among the first on the scene Wednesday around 8:30 p.m. when he came across two police vehicles on different streets with blood visible inside.
One of the vehicles, a marked police cruiser, was surrounded by shattered glass. The other, an unmarked SUV with its lights still on and the driver’s side door left open, had several bullet holes through its front windshield.
St. Louis, 51, said he saw something shortly after that will always haunt him.
“I walked over and I saw two feet, facing the street, toes up,” he said. “I realized, ‘Oh my God. There’s somebody down.’ As I got close, I realized it was an officer and this is not a good situation.”
Kenneth Keley told CityNews that he was out Wednesday evening across town for drinks with friends and wasn’t able to return home until 3:30 a.m. on Thursday because he lives in the neighbourhood where it all started.
“I’m smack dab in the red zone,” he said.
“I’m in the epicenter where everything happened,” he said. “I live on Coriander Street and honestly it would take geez maybe five to seven minutes to walk to where the police officers were shot.”
He said there’s literally no one outside his normally vibrant street because everyone was obeying police to stay indoors.
“We always hear about this on the news and now that it’s here it’s opened everyone’s eyes,” he said. “If it can happen here it can happen anywhere.”
With files from Showwei Chu, CityNews.ca
