A decade removed from his confrontation with a jihadist gunman in the halls of Parliament, former Sergeant-at-Arms Kevin Vickers is ready to offer his full account of that day’s deadly drama.
Vickers, now 68, has never before given an interview about the events of Oct. 22, 2014, when Michael Zehaf-Bibeau stormed through the front doors of Centre Block after shooting Cpl. Nathan Cirillo in the back as he stood sentry at the National War Memorial.
Vickers was one of the day’s central heroes: He put an end to the rampage by emptying his 9 mm pistol into Zehaf-Bibeau at close range. Four of the eight bullets recovered from Zehaf-Bibeau’s body were from Vickers’ weapon.
Until now, Vickers has kept his counsel about that terrible and chaotic day. But he believes it’s now time to unburden his memory, share some of its troubling secrets and set the record straight.
“It has been a difficult ten years not to say anything,” he says.
The former leader of the New Brunswick Liberal Party and the former ambassador of Canada to Ireland, Vickers is now retired in Trout Brook, New Brunswick.
He spends a lot of time in the sanctuary of the province’s woods. But not a day goes by, he says, when he does not think about the events of Oct. 22, 2014.
“To be involved in taking another person’s life is something that just sticks with you,” he says.
Vickers’ fateful day began with a meeting. Parliamentary security officials discussed a terror attack two days earlier in Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu, Que., during which one Canadian soldier died and another was injured after being rammed by a car.
“We were very worried that something could unfold in Ottawa,” remembers Vickers.
He had just returned to his Centre Block office with Patrick McDonell, director general of the House of Commons Protective Service, when Vickers heard what he called the “distinct sound of gunshots.” It was just before 10 a.m.
He ran to an adjacent office where he kept his firearm, a Smith and Wesson revolver, and loaded it with a 15-bullet clip, making sure to insert one round into the firing chamber.
A former RCMP officer, Vickers had maintained his firearms qualification after being appointed House of Commons Sergeant-at-Arms in May 2005.
When he came out his office door, gun drawn, Vickers turned right toward the Hall of Honour and could see Commons security officer Louis Létourneau on its far side.
“Sergeant, he’s hiding behind the pillar,” Létourneau said, pointing to an alcove at the end of the Hall of Honour in front of the entrance to the Library of Parliament, beside a pillar.
Vickers ran north to take up a position on the opposite side of the same pillar.
“I could hear the sickening sound of him breathing,” Vickers remembers. “He was making a large, wheezing, sucking sound. It led me to believe he was seriously wounded…You could tell he was labouring to breathe because of some kind of chest wound.”
According to an Ontario Provincial Police report on the incident, Zehaf-Bibeau drove to the East Block entrance after killing Cirillo, ran onto Parliament Hill, hijacked a minister’s limousine, drove to the base of the Peace Tower, and raced into Centre Block through its unlocked front doors.
Inside, he was confronted by two uniformed members of the Commons security service, both unarmed.
One of them, Const. Samearn Son, saw a rifle inside Zehaf-Bibeau’s coat and yelled, “Gun! Gun!” He lunged at Zehaf-Bibeau and tried to wrestle the weapon away, but the gunman fired a round that ricocheted off the floor and into Son’s leg.
Three plainclothes Commons security officers heard the commotion and drew their handguns; they fired 10 times at Zehaf-Bibeau as he ran north in the Hall of Honour. He returned fire once, nearly striking one of them, Cpl. Maxim Malo.
Another Commons security officer, Const. Létourneau, fired 17 times at the gunman, according to the OPP report.
Zehaf-Bibeau was hit at least twice during those initial fusillades before taking cover behind a pillar in front of the Library of Parliament.
Vickers maintained his position around the corner from the wounded Zehaf-Bibeau for about two minutes, waiting for an opportunity to strike. “I do recall getting a glimpse of him: He was trying to look around the pillar, and when I reached out to look around the pillar, I could see his head. I think we just missed seeing one another.”
He considered making a grab for the barrel of the gunman’s Winchester rifle, which poked out from the alcove. Then Vickers saw four RCMP officers advancing north along the Hall of Honour, in a diamond-shaped formation used to respond to an active shooter.
He motioned with his left arm to indicate where the gunman was hiding.
Zehaf-Bibeau fired in the direction of the approaching RCMP. It was the moment Vickers had been waiting for.
“That’s when I dove through the air – and I mean dove through the air – and shot at the same time,” Vickers remembers. “I know that first bullet of mine hit him because he made a terrible, loud sound, ‘Ugggh!’”
Vickers landed hard on his backside (he would have the bruises to prove it).
“I landed directly below his feet: I was literally looking up at him and he was looking down at me. I continued to shoot my firearm. He fell, not on top of me, but right beside me on the floor.”
When Vickers landed on the ground, the officer at the tip of the diamond-formation, RCMP Const. Curtis Barrett, also fired a heavy volley of shots at Zehaf-Bibeau. (Had Barrett fired earlier, Vickers believes he would have been struck since he dove in front of the gunman, between Zehaf-Bibeau and the advancing RCMP officers.)
At the same time, Vickers pushed himself back into a sitting position, further away from a squirming Zehaf-Bibeau, and emptied his weapon into the gunman.
Zehaf-Bibeau rolled, Vickers says, and went from being splayed east-west across the Hall of Honour to being positioned north-south, in front of the library door.
Vickers ran out of bullets. He looked to his right.
“I could see Constable Curtis Barrett continue to shoot,” Vickers says. “He shot the suspect several times in the back, and then there was one final shot in the back of the suspect’s head.”
Vickers says Zehaf-Bibeau was face down on the ground when he was shot in the base of the skull by Barrett, and not – as other accounts have suggested – with the gunman still upright. Vickers says Barrett was standing “right over top of him, reaching down” when the final shot was delivered.
Nearby, RCMP Sgt. Richard Rozon then yelled ‘Cease fire!’”
Zehaf-Bibeau was searched and handcuffed.
Barrett reached down and helped Vickers off the floor. “I’ll always remember he gave me a tremendous thud on the back with his hand,” Vickers says, “and yelled, ‘You got him! You got him!’”
For his part, Barrett has told a somewhat different story. In October 2016, he told the National Post that he walked towards Zehaf-Bibeau, firing his weapon, until the gunman fell to the floor.
“Everything I’d say about the final moments would be my perception of how it went,” he noted.
Barrett told OPP investigators he believed Zehaf-Bibeau might be wearing a suicide vest that could be detonated with a hand switch. After shooting him, Barrett said he checked the gunman’s hands and wrists for such a device, and found a large knife tied to his arm with rope.
A former Canadian Forces combat engineer, Barrett had previously served with the RCMP’s bomb disposal unit in British Columbia. On Parliament Hill, he worked as an explosive detections officer in the RCMP’s vehicle screening facility.
The OPP’s investigation into the death of Zehaf-Bibeau said postmortem evidence, drawn from the wound to the back of the gunman’s neck, indicated his “heart was still beating at the time this wound was inflicted.”
The OPP report said shots both to Zehaf-Bibeau’s head and heart would have been “rapidly fatal.”
It concluded that Barrett, and all the officers involved in the shooting, were justified in their lethal use of force given the threat Zehaf-Bibeau posed to their lives and the lives of those around them.
Vickers does not take issue with that conclusion. In fact, Vickers says he was visited in his office soon after the incident by former RCMP Chief Superintendent Louise Morel, then a private lawyer acting for Barrett. She wanted to know if Vickers would support Barrett in the event of legal action. She asked him, he says, whether he had any “problem or difficulty” with the way events unfolded.
Vickers said he did not.
“To me, it was ‘eliminate the suspect.’ I didn’t see anything untoward,” says Vickers. “It all unfolded so quickly.”
(This newspaper shared Vickers’ account with the RCMP and asked if it squared with the force’s understanding of events, or if Const. Barrett wanted to offer his own account. The RCMP said it had “no further comment on the matter.”)
Vickers’ own actions that day were a function of training and instinct. While stationed with the RCMP in Yellowknife, N.W.T., he was part of an emergency response team that practised extreme takedown manoeuvres.
“I remember it being one of the things we did: dive on the ground to shoot up at the suspect,” Vickers says. “I don’t know if that had any bearing or not. I certainly didn’t think about that.”’
Three months after the incident, Vickers was rewarded with a pay hike and a plum diplomatic post as Canada’s ambassador to Ireland. It meant he was out of the country when, in June 2015, the House of Commons Protective Service and the Senate Protective Service were amalgamated and put under the operational command of the RCMP.
Some MPs and senators opposed the idea since it broke with parliamentary tradition, and Green Party leader Elizabeth May asked that Vickers be returned from Ireland to weigh in on the proposal.
Vickers believes he was sent to Ireland to facilitate the RCMP takeover of Hill security.
“Obviously, someone wanted me out of Dodge,” he says.
In his opinion, Vickers says, it would have been possible to build on the reforms he had spearheaded to better integrate the RCMP and other agencies into the parliamentary security services. “I think there are hybrid models that could have been developed to accommodate everyone’s concerns and needs while maintaining the independence of Parliament,” he says.
Like Elizabeth May, Vickers says he’s surprised there has never been an open, parliamentary review of the events of Oct. 22, 2014. (Four independent reviews made 161 recommendations for change.)
It continues to bother him, Vickers says, that the gunman was able to run onto the Hill without being challenged. At the time, the RCMP was exclusively responsible for security outside Parliament. “For him to walk straight in off of Wellington Street, to me, that was beyond the pale,” he says.
He believes all witness statements from that day should be released to the public. He also finds it disconcerting that security video, which captures Zehaf-Bibeau’s exchange of fire with Commons security officers in the Rotunda, has never been shown to the public. Vickers has viewed the video, and says it shows Zehaf-Bibeau turned and fired at Commons security officer Maxim Malo, narrowly missing him.
“The bullet strikes a pillar in the foyer – you can see the dust scattering – and then you can see Corporal Malo fire his weapon,” he says. “And you can see Zehaf-Bibeau, his body jerking from the shot.”
He contends it’s this shot that inflicted Zehaf-Bibeau’s initial chest wound.
Vickers says he’s also saddened that the weapons used in the confrontation were destroyed years ago when new pistols were issued: “For what it’s worth, I believe they should have been kept as museum pieces.”
One piece of that history has been preserved. Someone quietly saved the trigger from Vickers’ weapon and sent it to him. It now forms a family heirloom.
Vickers grew up in the Miramichi Valley, in the town of Newcastle, N.B. While still a schoolboy, he decided on a career in the RCMP after seeing three Mounties emerge from the local courthouse in their red serge. He spent 30 years in the RCMP, rising to the rank of chief superintendent, before being asked to interview for the position of House of Commons security director.
“I saw a father and son playing Frisbee on the lawns of Parliament Hill that day,” he remembers, “and I fell in love with the place. I knew then I wanted to protect it.”
Today, 10 years after the attack on Parliament Hill, Vickers says he continues to greatly admire the bravery of the Commons security officers who confronted Zehaf-Bibeau, and the four RCMP officers who risked their lives by advancing on him with little cover.
Some of those officers, including Const. Barrett, have suffered from post-traumatic stress in the aftermath of that event. Not Vickers. He saw many terrible things during his RCMP career, he says, and Zehaf-Bibeau’s end does not keep him up at night.
“Every night, I’m asleep before my head hits the pillow,” he says.
Andrew Duffy is a National Newspaper Award-winning reporter and long-form feature writer based in Ottawa. To support his work, including exclusive content for subscribers only, sign up here: ottawacitizen.com/subscribe