Ottawa shooting: Stroller mom who alerted RCMP to Zehaf-Bibeau threat speaks out
Witness to shooting had not been interviewed by police until yesterday
Terrified, running for her life while pushing her nine-month-old baby in a stroller, Kristel Peters was the first person to warn the RCMP on Parliament Hill about the killer Michael Zehaf-Bibeau.
She says she witnessed Zehaf-Bibeau shoot Cpl. Nathan Cirillo at the National War Memorial. Yet neither the RCMP nor the Ontario Provincial Police ever spoke to her until yesterday, after she spoke to the CBC.
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As CBC News has now exclusively learned, some of her testimony contradicts comments made by the RCMP in the wake of four different reports released this week — comments that appear to blame Peters for slowing down the reaction time of the RCMP officer involved.
"I'd never been to Parliament Hill," says Peters, a 35-year-old mother from the South Shore of Montreal, who spoke to CBC Radio's The House.
On Oct. 22, Peters was in Ottawa to visit her husband, who was working on a construction project. As she walked on Wellington Street, just north of the National War Memorial, she heard shots. "I saw a man who seemed to me dressed in black," she says. "He had a big rifle. I thought that it was a show until I realized that a person fell at the time."
That person was Cirillo, who was shot three times in the back by Zehaf-Bibeau. Peters suddenly realized she and her baby were in danger. The safest place to go, she thought, was Parliament Hill, where she assumed there would be police officers at the gate. But there weren't.
"I was just surprised that there was no one," Peters said. "No security guards. No police anywhere to be seen."
So she kept running up the Hill — as a security video released by the RCMP clearly shows — not realizing that Zehaf-Bibeau was not far behind her. Out of breath, she finally found an RCMP officer in a cruiser parked near the East Block.
"I told [the officer] there was a shooter out there," Peters recalls. The officer got on her radio to report the shooter, but at that moment Zehaf-Bibeau hijacked a minister's black limousine near them and headed up to Centre Block.
"She said right away — 'That's the shooter' — she said I have to go," Peters says. The officer told Peters to take cover behind Parliament Hill, and then, her front door still open, the officer drove after Zehaf-Bibeau. The officer never radioed another member of the RCMP to help Peters, and no other officer ever came to Peters' aid.
I was just surprised that there was no one. No security guards. No police anywhere to be seen. — Kristel Peters
"I felt a bit left there out in the open," Peters says. "I still thought that [Zehaf-Bibeau] was out there shooting anyone that he would see."
But questions have been raised about the RCMP officer's response at this moment. At the briefing this week during the release of the Ontario Provincial Police report, RCMP Assistant Commissioner Gilles Michaud appeared to blame Peters for slowing down the officer's reaction time.
Contradicting reports
"Our officer was trying to prevent the lady that was trying to get in the back seat of her car," Michaud said. "So she was fighting off that individual as she spotted Zehaf-Bibeau."
But that is not how Peters remembers the events. "I wasn't trying to get in her car," Peters says. She does acknowledge that she spoke to the officer about taking cover in the police car, but there was no fight about it and she never tried to get inside. She says they both abandoned the idea the moment the officer spotted Zehaf-Bibeau.
"I wouldn't want to be in her car when she's going after him," Peters says. "Of course I'd want to be somewhere safe."
The officer told Peters she had to go after Zehaf-Bibeau. "That's when she said, 'He's there. I'm going after him.' You know, I completely understand. She's got a job to do," Peters says.
Why the contradiction between the RCMP account and Peters's account? One explanation is that the RCMP didn't speak to Peters until after they released their final report, so they relied exclusively on the RCMP officer's version of events.
Peters told CBC News she remained silent until she heard the RCMP version of the events after their reports came out on Wednesday. She said she saw "discrepancies" in the media reports about the events and she wanted to correct them.
The RCMP told Peters they tried to locate her but couldn't. "They said they had been looking for me for months," Peters says.
