When Joanne Oakes woke up last Saturday morning, she quickly discovered something wasn’t right inside her home. “I came out to my living room and there was drywall all over the floor and that’s when I started looking at the walls and noticed there was two big holes. Then I noticed there was a bullet on my desk,” said Oakes. At some point during the early-morning hours of Jan. 31, shots were fired at the multi-unit building where she lives on Dufferin Street in downtown Moncton, N.B. Oakes said there’s a total of nine bullet holes, which are visible from the sidewalk, on the front wall of the building. Oakes doesn’t feel like she or anyone else in the building was targeted, but the incident has left her shaken. “Terrified. I don’t even feel comfortable sitting in my living room anymore and watching TV. I find I’m going in my bedroom,” she said. “I’m not even getting to enjoy my full house anymore.” She’s lived there for nine years and said nothing like this has ever happened before. Oakes admitted it’s not the greatest of neighbourhoods, especially directly across the street, where a lot of public drug use takes place in the field, especially in the warmer months. But she’s never heard gunshots before. She called the RCMP right away and said they’ve been taking it very seriously and doing their due diligence. “It’s so alarming. It’s like a random act of violence and that’s what makes it more scary than anything,” said Oakes. Const. Luc Picard of the Codiac Regional RCMP said police received a call on Jan. 31 and the shooting is under investigation. “Our members are working to gather evidence and there’s no belief that the homeowner was targeted by any means,” said Picard. “Most likely, it was a random act.” Picard could not confirm the number of bullet holes there were in the building. “It’s ongoing, we’re investigating and we’re gathering evidence,” he said. “We’re having members on patrol on the streets as much as we can.” On Thursday, the RCMP sent a news release about a separate incident in Dieppe, three days before the shooting on Dufferin Street. Police are asking for the public’s help after shots were fired at a home on Denys Avenue between 12:30 a.m. and 1:30 a.m. on Jan. 28. No one was injured in the drive-by shooting and that investigation is also ongoing. Oakes said she’s aware of that incident. “It makes me worried that it’s connected in some way,” she said. A woman who lives in the same neighbourhood as Oakes, but didn’t want to be identified, said the area is quite dangerous. “There is a lot of traffic that creates vandalism. There are a lot of break-ins. There’s a lot of damage being done. People are getting hurt,” she said. “I’ve probably made over 30 calls to the city. I have gone one week where I called the RCMP at least twice a day.” The woman didn’t think a shooting was out of the ordinary. “It’s not. It’s really not,” she said. There are surveillance cameras on nearby St. George Street, which is much busier, but Oakes would like to see more cameras throughout the downtown core like there are in larger cities. For more New Brunswick news, visit our dedicated provincial page.
