Employees usually start trickling into the Western Forest Products mill in downtown Nanaimo about 6 a.m., but Wednesday wasn’t a shipment day, so things were quiet.
Al Thompson, a trucker who hauls from the mill, picked his trailer up from inside, a trip he makes multiple times daily, at about 6:45 a.m.
“Nobody was around, really,” he said. “There were only a couple of cars in the parking lot.”
Ten minutes later, a lone gunman fired gunshots in the parking lot and then the office, RCMP said.
The shooter, said to be an ex-employee, struck four people — killing two — and the scene quickly turned to panic.
People outside, kept back by yellow police tape, tried to figure out if their friends and family members were among the dead and wounded.
“I know them all [inside],” Thompson said about two hours after the shooting, tense with shock.
“They’re all my buddies. I know every one of them. … Everybody always seems happy here. We get into the dispatch shack, we tell jokes and everything like that. Just normal, you know what I mean? We work normal.”
The experience was surreal for Thompson and fellow trucker Al Fraser, who said the mill had been doing well and was finally making a profit after being closed for almost two years.
“You read this in the news all the time, people killing and stabbing each other. But this doesn’t happen in Nanaimo,” Thompson said. “It just blows me away.”
Janine Westby was also at the scene Wednesday morning, trying to figure out whether the father of her 11-year-old son was OK.
Westby got a call shortly before she drove her son to school for the day, hearing that multiple people were shot at the Western Forest Products mill, where she knows everyone since her father worked inside for 30 years, and her ex-husband, Mike Wetzel, for 21 years.
But in her son’s company, she had to pretend everything was OK, even though she knew his dad might be dead. “I was trying to act like it was a normal day,” she said.
On arriving at the mill, Westby approached the police tape in tears, asking officers if they could just reassure her that her son’s father was alive. She received a text message from Wetzel soon after saying he hadn’t been shot.
“I don’t know how much Mike saw and I don’t know who the shooter was,” she said later. “I know everybody that comes in and out [of this mill]. It doesn’t matter if they’re a mill employee or a truck driver.”
Westby said she doesn’t want to speculate, but she knows there are a lot of former employees who are angry about a long-standing dispute over what the mill’s union describes as “severance pay avoidance” relating to mill closings. “There is a huge arbitration thing and it’s been going on for five years,” she said.
“I don’t know if that’s what caused it. I have no idea.”
Westby’s friend Shiela Jones arrived at the scene with her because many people from the Snuneymuxw First Nation, where she is from, work at the mill.
Jones also got good news, learning that her relatives were all OK.
A few hours after the shooting, some employees drove out of the mill in a sombre line, many with blank expressions, others shaking, some crying.
One longtime employee, Dave Agren, a large man with a white beard, sobbed as his family members ran up to his vehicle to embrace him, crying “our guy is fine,” and “oh my God.”
Tali Campbell, who is close to Agren and “like a stepson” said he had never seen Agren so emotional in 17 years of knowing him.
“Shaking and crying isn’t something you see from a big, tough guy like that. He likes to keep his emotions in,” Campbell said. “This is pretty rattling, that’s for sure.”
