The call started off as a domestic, but I quickly learned that the protagonist had left the house and had taken a rifle with him. He was drunk and had driven off in their truck. There was a relief member in town and I quickly picked him up and we went looking for the truck. I'd already been shot at once that year and wasn't looking forward to another gun complaint.
Driving by our office I looked up and saw the truck on a higher road, driving parallel to us and accelerating, so we sped on hoping to get ahead of him to cut him off. We couldn't find him. Now Arctic Bay isn't a very big place and there aren't a lot of places to hide a pickup, but this one seeming had disappeared moments after we initially saw it. What had, in fact, had happened was that the driver lost control only a couple of houses beyond where we had seen it, the truck went off the road and managed to bump into a shed/construction crate between two houses. When we got there the fellow was gone, now we needed to find him without the benefit of a pickup truck to look for.
A short time later we were flagged down by a woman who let us know that the fellow we were looking for was at her house. He had come into the house, pointed the gun at her and told her to leave. When she tried to talk him into putting down the gun he threatened to shoot her. (Coincidentally this same house was the scene of our next firearms call, and the gun in this incident came from the same home as the previous shooting).
The (real) basic idea when you have an armed person in a house is to contain them there and establish contact and a dialogue (when you're alone that consists of yelling "Come out I have you surrounded."). Pierre, the relief member, and I essentially snuck up on the neighbouring houses to watch and wait. Shortly I heard Pierre on the radio saying the fellow was at the window and I could hear him talking to him. By the time I worked around to the other side where Pierre was supposedly hidden he wasn't there. I soon saw that he was talking to the suspect through an open window, I joined him.
We knew that the fellow was alone in the house, and we began talking to him, convincing him that he would be better off to give up. Many times, with barricaded people, they see no way out. Events begin to spriral out of their control and they literally think they have no options. What we did was stand out there and try and stop that spiral, calm the fellow and ease the panic that he was feeling. That done we convinced him to stick his hands out the window, where Pierre could watch, while I went inside to get the gun, and him. The danger here is that, of course, there is nothing to stop him from ducking back inside and apart from warning me I would be inside the house with no where to go.
But we were persuasive and when I got to the kitchen he still had his hands out the window. The rifle lay on the counter near him, loaded. I unloaded it it and then walked out of the house with him and the rifle.
Incredibly there were three of us in town for the next firearm incident, the relief member hadn't left yet after the arrival of my partner. But it was a perfect example of how some times circumstances force your hand and you can still find yourself dealing with something alone.
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Facinating stories and a breath-taking banner to boot 😀 Arctic Bay is gifted with both scenary and photographers 😀
Thanks Jennith. The scenery is breath-taking, the photographer occasionally gets lucky.