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Longevity

Fighting the Good Fight: Second Shooting

I woke up for work on December 18th, about three months after being at the Roode’s house, with the start of what seemed to be the flu. Not being the type to take a day off for minor ails, I started getting ready for work. I was sweating, so I decided not to wear my bulletproof vest. I had a couple of slices of toast and a quick coffee before saying goodbye to Marianne. We had plans later that evening to attend my wife’s staff Christmas party over at Jeannie Riordan’s, her intern’s house. We were looking forward to the party, and I was hoping this bit of a bug I’d picked up would be out of my system by the end of my shift. It was a beautiful sunny day, the kind of December day that is bright but frigid. It was near minus eighteen degrees Celsius outside. It’s the

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Longevity

Fighting the good fight: the first shooting

When I first sat down with my editor to write this memoir, the Darren Roode shootings were the first stories I needed to write. It was as if they were the cap on top of the well, and unless I exorcised them, I felt nothing else would come forward.  There are always a limited number of cases that mark one’s career as an RCMP officer. The Darren Roode shootings are part of those cases. I was on afternoon patrol in Colchester County, Nova Scotia. Truro, where I’d first been stationed, is the shire town of Colchester County. We had an area of just over four hundred kilometres to patrol with a population of roughly thirty thousand. I had entered the small village of Bible Hill where my current detachment was situated. Bible Hill is a small community on the north side of the Salmon River. It had a population of

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