A young woman out walking her dog says she feared for her life when she came face-to-face with the man accused of killing three Mounties in Moncton late Wednesday.
Caroline Wilson was walking her dog shortly before 7:30 p.m. local time when she saw police officers searching nearby woods.
Wanting to leave the officers to their work, Wilson walked on and turned a corner down Foxwood Drive. It was then that she heard shots fired nearby. A moment later, she saw the man who police are seeking in the shootout that left three Mounties dead and two others injured in hospital.
“I saw him before he saw me. So I stopped and I kind of froze and I tried to figure out where I was going to go,” Wilson told CTV News in a FaceTime interview. Only audio of her responses was recorded.
When she looked back at him, “he was looking at me.”
When she first spotted the man, he was running while holding a firearm above his head “and yelling something about ‘Come get me cops,’” Wilson said.
When he stopped running he also lowered his weapon, she said, “which kind of freaked me out because I thought he was going to shoot me.”
Wilson and her dog ran into a nearby backyard, where they hid for a few moments before she realized she had no idea where the man with the firearm had gone.
“That’s what freaked me out the most because I didn’t know where he was,” she said.
She began running through more backyards before emerging onto a street. In a stroke of luck, friends of hers drove by again. She jumped in their car and they drove her home.
Wilson said she called police and then her parents, who raced home. The family hid in the basement as the sounds of sirens and helicopters filled the neighbourhood.
A friend reported hearing more gunshots in the area after she got home.
Her close encounter led to a sleepless night, Wilson said.
“I guess I’m tired because I keep playing it over and over again,” she said. “I’m glad I’m home. I’m kind of freaked out that they don’t know exactly where he is and that he’s still out there. But they’ll get him.”
