A former B.C. solicitor general is calling for more accountability for those who purchase large amounts of ammunition, after further details were released Friday about a fatal shootout between two bank robbers and police in Saanich last June.
Kash Heed said it’s clear Matthew and Isaac Auchterlonie, 22, part of a set of triplets from the Cowichan Valley, expected to die in the confrontation and and wanted to “go out in a blaze of glory.”
Normally bank robbers are in and out of an institution in less than two minutes. “The fact that these people remained there for 16 minutes — you knew they were there to confront authority.”
Another tip-off was that they parked their sedan facing inwards, not outwards as bank robbers would do, Heed said.
The Auchterlonies wore body armour and carried semi-automatic SKS rifles when they entered a small Bank of Montreal branch on Shelbourne Street in Saanich in the late morning of June 28 last year.
After the shooting, police found four more firearms, more than 3,500 rounds of ammunition, and more than 30 improvised explosive devices that appeared to be homemade.
Heed, a former West Vancouver police chief who also held senior roles in the Vancouver Police Department tackling gangs and working on drug enforcement, says steps need to be taken to prevent something similar from happening again.
“We can put stringent regulations in place so when someone comes in and purchases or accumulates that much ammunition, that has to be reported to authorities. Then authorities have to have the resources to look into it.”
“We need to create the systems, the processes and have the resources to make sure we can interdict these types of behaviours.”
Heed said if investigators had the resources or ability to probe into the lives and associates of the brothers, “I would guarantee that they would come out with the red flags.”
About 200 officers from various departments responded to the robbery, and six Greater Victoria Emergency Response Team members were taken to hospital. Only two have since returned to work.
Heed said it’s likely more officers would have been shot if the ERT team had not been present.
None of the 22 civilians in the branch were physically hurt.
The report into the Saanich shooting released Friday by the Vancouver Island Integrated Major Crime Unit said the brothers wanted to kill as many police officers as they could.
Evidence showed they had strong anti-government, anti-police and anti-authority views and were outraged by restrictions on their access to firearms and body armour, it said.
That report followed a December report from the Independent Investigations Office of B.C., a police watchdog agency, that cleared police of any wrongdoing.
Heed pointed to the 1997 North Hollywood shooting at a Bank of America branch as an example of what the brothers may have been emulating.
In that case, two gunmen wearing body armour and carrying automatic rifles died, while a dozen police officers and eight civilians were injured. It’s estimated the robbers fired 1,100 rounds, while the police, most of whom carried standard-issue pistols, fired about 650.
Heed thinks the Auchterlonies, who also dressed in body armour, wanted to “make a name for themselves.”
There can be problems in Canada with “people who are either anti-authority or have some type of mental capacity issue to the extent where they want to glorify themselves when they do have confrontations.”
They do not necessarily care what happens to themselves, he said.
Robert Gordon, a professor emeritus in criminology at Simon Fraser University, said the difficulty in trying to gain a deeper understanding of those who intend to die in a confrontation with police is that they aren’t able to talk about it if they’ve been successful.
“We don’t know what has been going on in their minds,” he said.
Gordon said such incidents are uncommon in Canada. “We are lucky enough not to have a whole basket of these incidents upon which we can draw.”
His comments came as reports emerged of a mass shooting aimed at civilians in Monterey Park, California, late Saturday night. In that case, it appears a gunman entered a ballroom dance studio and killed 10 people and injured 10 more before fleeing the scene. A suspect was found dead on Sunday.
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