A Nova Scotia Mountie testified that a mere glance at the bloody driver of a Mazda hatchback was the final confirmation that he had lined up a mass murderer with his pistol. Const. Craig Hubley, a dog handler, joined Const. Ben MacLeod, an emergency officer, on Thursday told a public inquiry how they ended a 13-hour riot by a gunman who killed 22 people on April 18-19, 2020. Hubley testified that while on the hunt for the killer on the morning of April 19, he carefully studied photographs of wanted dentist Gabriel Wortman at a police station and tried to “burn them in the eye of my mind.” More than three hours later, when he and MacLeod entered an Enfield, NS gas station at 11:24 a.m. to refuel, Hubley said he spotted a man wearing a white T-shirt with a gray Mazda at a pump opposite the SUV police officer. . He told the investigation that as he got out of his vehicle, his suspicions were particularly aroused by the man who did not seem to know that blood was flowing from a blow to the head. “What struck me most about that quarter of a second was that he had a wound he was not dealing with,” Hubley said, answering questions from commission lawyer Roger Burrill. “I was quite worried when I started pulling my pistol and realized it was him. I remember shouting “Benny, this is him”, I bring (the gun) in a position of readiness for threat and then I put my eyes on him. He made a spasmodic move to the left. When I shouted “Benny, this is him”, (the perpetrator) looked at me. “I was already 100 percent sure it was him, but he confirmed it was. It matched the photos I had seen at the headquarters earlier that morning. They were not exactly the same, but they were enough for me,” he said. Both Hubley and MacLeod testified that they started firing when they saw Wortman lifting a gun with his right hand. It was the pistol that belonged to Const. Heidi Stevenson, who was killed by gunmen in Shubenacadie, NS, earlier that morning. The investigation found that in the ensuing seconds, Hubley fired 12 bullets through the passenger window, while MacLeod, who got out of the SUV shortly after Hubley, dropped 11 rounds of ammunition with his carbine. Beryl asked at the end of the officers’ testimony if there was anything they would have done differently that day, and they both replied, “No.” In the afternoon, Michael Scott, a lawyer representing the families of 14 of the 22 victims, asked police what prompted them to take the highway from Trouro to Halifax, sometimes driving at speeds that Hubley estimated at 180 kilometers per hour. . Hubley said no specific instructions had been given by the incident commanders, but rather they decided, “we wanted to catch him (the killer).” Both officers said their experience earlier in the day had shown that Wortman was extremely dangerous and that this affected the way they reacted at the gas station. Hubley was moved when he remembered that he had gone to the home of Jamie and Greg Blair, where he saw many corpses, and found that the family dog ​​had also been shot. The shooting of the pet hit the policeman as a sign of a murderer who was “vengeful”. “This animal was painful for me, because I had gone to other murder scenes … but never where anyone would vent their anger,” he testified. Hubley, answering Scott’s questions, said that if Wortman had raised his hands and there was no pistol in them, the killer might have just been arrested. “I know there will be a lot of people who will ask … ‘Why didn’t we give him a chance (to surrender).’ Before deciding on April 25, the commission observed a minute’s silence on the recall of the 22 victims, including a woman who was pregnant, noting that the second anniversary of the killings would be on Monday and Tuesday. This Canadian Press report was first published on April 14, 2022.