Portapique: A former neighbor of the killer was so afraid of him that she moved | Portapique massacre: Nova Scotia in mourning

A vehicle belonging to Gabriel Wortman is seen in the rubble of his burned home at 220 Portapique Beach Road, Portapique, Nova Scotia, shortly after the April 2020 shooting.

The Board of Inquiry into the April 2020 Nova Scotia shooting heard testimony from a former neighbor of the killer on Tuesday. Brenda Forbes said she was so afraid of him that she ended up selling her house and moving out.

The commission heard testimony from the woman, visibly moved and still traumatized by what she experienced in Portapique in the early 2000s.

This retired soldier said that she alerted residents to the danger of her neighbor on numerous occasions.

He asked us if we could provide him with ammunition or weapons or anything like that and we definitely told him not, said Brenda Forbes.

However, the killer managed to get some because ;he had fun shooting on his land.

My husband told her he couldn't do this, Brenda Forbes said, but the killer wouldn't have listened.

Brenda Forbes, a former neighbor of the Portapique killer, has bad memories of that time.

Even more disturbing, Brenda Forbes witnessed the violence that Gabriel Wortman was doing suffer to his spouse Lisa Banfield.

We had reached the point where I was afraid that she would be killed, she testified.

Brenda Forbes informed the RCMP in 2013, seven years before the man in question is carrying out the worst mass murder in modern Canadian history.

Nothing has been done, ever, he laments her.

In fact, dozens of witnesses have recounted in interviews with the commission how violent this former denturist was, ripping out dentures from clients who couldn't pay and sexually harassing clients and employees, even after being disciplined. by the College of Denturists in 2007.

After pleading guilty to assaulting a 15-year-old boy in 2002, he received a ban temporary possession of weapons.

Yet in an email sent the day after the shooting to the office of the Minister of Public Safety, RCMP Commissioner Brenda Lucki listed four weapons semi -automatics used by the killer.

She initially indicated that this information should not be made public, but in another email she indicated instead that x27;she wanted the type of weapons to be revealed.

A committee of the House of Commons must look into communications between the RCMP and the Trudeau government by the end of the month.

Based on a report by Adrien Blanc