Tenants barred from homes after fatal shootings steel themselves for return
Police could give 70 displaced residents go-ahead on Monday to return to apartment complex where 4 died
Nineteen-year-old Justin McLean hasn't had trouble falling asleep since gunshots woke him up Friday morning and he saw three bodies on the ground outside his Fredericton apartment.
It's when he's asleep the trouble starts.
McLean said he has been tormented by dreams of what he could have done differently during the shootings that killed two police officers and the man and woman they were trying to reach.
"If I could have saved them — if I could have helped them at all," McLean said Sunday, as he contemplated returning to the apartment complex on the north side of the city, where the shootings happened.
"Because I stayed there and watched them lay there for probably 20 minutes to a half-hour. It was very hard to do. After, when you hear gunshots outside, you want to go out and help, but you're putting your own life at risk too."
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Fredericton police still haven't confirmed exactly when residents of 237 Brookside Drive will be able to return to their homes, but it's expected to be sometime Monday.
About 70 people had to leave their homes after the slaying of Const. Robb Costello, Const. Sara Burns, Donnie Robichaud, 42, and Bobbi Lee Wright, 32. A suspect, Matthew Vincent Raymond, who lived in one of the apartment buildings, has been charged with four counts of first-degree murder.
Some tenants found temporary homes with friends or relatives, and the Red Cross helped others.
McLean, who has been staying with his parents in Lincoln, said he left his apartment without shoes on and had to buy new clothes and essentials to get by in the meantime.
Trying to process events
He knows it will be tough, but he wants to return to his home.
"What I saw, it would probably keep coming back," he said. "Just because it's right there outside my window, where it happened, it would just bring back the memories.
"I'll have to process it. All I can do is try."
His neighbour in another building on the property, Christopher Gill, is not sure how he will feel returning but is just waiting for the go-ahead.
"I feel like it's the same place I knew the whole time," he said.
Gill said he woke up to what he thought sounded like construction being done to one of the buildings. He got a phone call saying there was a shooter on Brookside Drive, but didn't realize how close the danger was.
"I was in a basement apartment, so I felt I was pretty safe. I was underground, the windows were all shut, the curtains were all shut, so if I had known what was going on so dangerously close I may have felt more fear of the whole thing."
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He and other residents who had to leave the complex know there were bullet holes, broken glass, and doors-kicked in during the shooting and police response Friday, but the extent of the damage, structural and emotional, may only be apparent when they get back home.
Red Cross spokesperson Dan Bedell and Judith Aguilar, an office manager at Sunfield Apartment Rentals, both said they are waiting for the go-ahead from police before they start getting people back into their homes.
Won't go back
Not all tenants want to return.
Mojdava Motallebikia told CBC reporters on the morning of the shooting that he couldn't imagine something like this happening in Canada.
"I never seen such a thing," he said. "I cannot live longer in this apartment building."
Erin Sabattis, who watched from her son's bedroom window as shots were fired, said she is struggling to cope with what she saw.
RCMP told her on Sunday they were still hopeful residents could return Monday. She said they let people inside to retrieve medicine and pets though.
Gill, who is staying with his parents in Stanley, said he's not sure when tenants will be allowed back.
But he said he doesn't feel the trauma other witnesses are going through right now.
"I don't know if it hasn't really completely dawned on me yet, but I seem to be doing OK from a mental point of view."
Like many people in Fredericton, Gill has questions.
"I'm just wondering what the motive of this is," he said. "There hasn't really been a whole lot of details that have been given out at the moment.
"I wonder what would have made somebody do something like this, especially in Fredericton."