Three Cops Shot Dead By A 'Rambo-Styled' Shooter. What We Know So Far

Royal Canadian Mounted Police said they arrested early Friday morning 24-year-old Justin Bourque, who is suspected of killing three officers in New Brunswick in one of the worst mass shootings in the Mounties’ history. Bourque had been the object of a massive manhunt in eastern Canada since Wednesday evening.

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Paul Greene, a spokesman for the Mounted Police, said the suspect was taken into custody about 12:30 a.m. Friday. The suspect was reportedly armed with high-powered rifles and spotted three times while evading the nearly 30-hour manhunt.

Residents of the city in southeast New Brunswick were told they could resume normal life after a lockdown, during which they were told to stay inside and bolt their doors. The shooter, dressed “Rambo”-style in camouflage and a headband — and armed with at least two rifles and a crossbow — had been on the loose since his confrontation with police, which reportedly began when someone called in a report about an armed man in the neighborhood about 7:30 p.m. Wednesday

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Police responded to the scene and five officers were shot. The two surviving officers were injured. As of Thursday morning, the whole town of Moncton, where the shootings took place, was all but shut down as police from around the country searched for the suspect. Police urged local residents to keep their doors locked and turn on exterior lights to help out police.

A heavily armed man dressed in camouflage shot and killed three Royal Canadian Mounted Police officers and injured three others Wednesday night in New Brunswick.

As of this morning, the whole town of Moncton, where the shootings took place, was locked down. And the person the Mounties say they are hunting was still on the loose, last seen with two rifles, a knife and a crossbow.

It was uncertain whether the shootings were the result of a confrontation with police or an ambush of some kind.

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A witness told the Associated Press he saw the apparent shooter in the distance Wednesday evening, wearing a camouflage outfit and standing in the middle of the street with his gun pointed at police cars. Then he heard automatic weapon fire and retreated into his home.

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Three Royal Canadian Mounted Police officers were shot and killed, Constable Damien Theriault told reporters. "Two of our officers were also injured, but their lives are not threatened at this time," he said, his voice breaking at times.

Joan MacAlpine-Stiles said she saw the gunman when she opened a window. "It was really warm in the house, so we opened up the windows in the family room and there he was going across through the back with this rifle on his shoulder," she told CNN partner CBC.

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"I said, 'Oh my God, there he is with camouflage and the headband and a gun, and it looked like a bow he had with him, and I mean he was just through our backyard,'" she said.

After police arrived, neighbor Vanessa Bernatchez watched with a couple of others from a living room window. She uploaded a video of the confrontation to Facebook. "He shot him. He shot the ... cop," a man in the video exclaims. "Call 911!"

This Facebook account under the name Justin Bourque — which glorifies guns, evinces a fear of a Russian invasion and depicts a camouflaged, heavily armed man who resembles the gunman — has been identified by several media outlets and locals as belonging to the cop’s suspect.

“Gotta love when a friend like justin turns out to be a mulltible killer,” wrote Darren Burlock, of Moncton, hours after the shooting.

The Washington Post could not confirm that this Facebook account belongs to the suspect in the shootings, and messages left with Bourque and his Facebook friends were not immediately returned Thursday morning. If the account belongs to the suspect Justin Bourque, the alleged shooter would bear some similarities to Eliot Rodger, who shot and killed seven in southern California and also left behind a chilling social media trail.

Nearly every post involved violence — “no remorse crushing the human race” — the necessity to bear arms, or what he characterized as governments’ infringement upon people’s rights.

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“Soon they’ll put a tag on you,” he wrote earlier this year. “They already gave you your number, they decided how you are allowed to live, they paid for your school so you learned their doctrine, they take your money so they can employ people who control you, they told you to lay down your arms, but continually increase the number of their arms, they made your forefathers fight and die against socialism for them, they turned they’re grand children into socialistic puppets to serve them, they tell us to live in peace, yet they start wars…the new age of the tyrants is already upon us.”

He represented himself as a militiaman, expressing anger toward other people whom he called ignorant to the dangers of an ongoing “silent war. … Ask yourself, would you fight for the future of your children or grandchildren, or your family and friends sons and daughters? The answer is: no you’re too stupid to know what to fight for, cause we’re already losing the silent war you don’t wanna believe is happening.”

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“No one will ever know the truth, ever know the full story if they kill Justin Bourque,” said one whose profile picture is an image of Adolph Hitler. “And those that know anything about him will most likely never divulge, because of the sheeple. If you want to know why, then you’ll have to ask him yourself, and you can’t do that if he’s dead.”

The city’s homepage proudly proclaims that it’s been “recognized by Readers Digest as the most polite and honest city in Canada.”

According to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police's Honour Roll, the last incidence of officers being shot dead on duty in New Brunswick was in 1978. In 2005, four RCMP officers were shot dead in the western province of Alberta in the deadliest attack on Canadian police in 120 years. They had been investigating a farm when a man opened fire. He was later killed.

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