Investigators have identified the man who was allegedly involved in a fatal shootout with two police officers on Monday as Fred Preston, a 70-year-old former elected official of a small northern Ontario community.
The province's Special Investigations Unit said Preston, a resident of Burk's Falls, Ont., was wounded in the shootout and is in a London, Ont. hospital in critical condition.
Fifteen-year veteran OPP officer Const. Vu Pham succumbed to injuries he sustained in the exchange of gunfire in Seaforth, a town located northwest of London, Ont.
He was responding to a domestic call and was shot after he pulled over a suspect in a vehicle.
Witnesses reported hearing about 15 to 20 gunshots.
Murray and Stephanie Houghton said they heard about the shooting over the radio.
"We just sat by the phone and waited to hear what really happened," Murray Houghton told CTV's Canada AM Tuesday in a telephone interview from Wingham, Ont.
The Houghton and Pham family were close, taking vacations together and watching their children play hockey at a local arena.
"He was a wonderful, wonderful man," Stephanie Houghton said, fighting tears. "He adored his children, adored his wife. They were everything to him."
Pham, 37, was also an avid outdoorsman who would often take his wife and three young sons on camping trips.
Aside from serving his community as a police officer, he also helped out as a soccer and hockey coach in his Wingham, Ont. hometown.
OPP Sgt. David Rektor remembered the man as a "good friend, great colleague and a very good officer."
"It's a sad day for all of us," he said in an interview with Canada AM. "A lot of us are still in shock over his killing.
"We're going to have to rally together in the course of the next few weeks, months and come to grips with it," he said.
Rektor said most people are surprised when they hear about violence taking place in small towns. He said police know better than to assume small towns are danger-free and are trained to deal with any situation they may encounter.
"You hope training will carry you through from incident to incident but sometimes you pay the ultimate sacrifice," he said. "That's exactly what happened with Const. Pham."
The province's Special Investigations Unit is now probing the shooting. The organization investigates each case where a civilian is injured in the presence of police officers.
Pham is the 104th Ontario Provincial Police officer killed in the line of duty since the force's inception 100 years ago. Twenty four, including Pham, were fatally shot and one was fatally stabbed.
He is the second Ontario police officer to die on the job in a week. On March 1, Peel Regional Police Const. James Ochakovsky was killed in a car crash on his way to help another police officer in a non-emergency situation.
