Four killed after shootings in Sault Ste. Marie, Ont., police say

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Four people including three children were fatally shot across two locations in the Northern Ontario community of Sault Ste. Marie in an attack that police said was a case of intimate partner violence.

The attacker also died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound during the attack late Monday night, while another adult was shot and taken to hospital.

The mass killing, the province’s latest homicides believed to be carried out by an intimate partner, shocked the community of about 77,000 people located on the Canada-U.S. border, about a seven-hour drive northwest of Toronto. Police released almost no details about the victims’ genders or their relationship to the attacker, saying that information would not be shared publicly given the domestic nature of the crime.

The Sault Ste. Marie Police Service said in an news release that officers responded at around 10:20 p.m. to a call for a break-and-enter at a home, then discovered a 41-year-old shot and killed. About 10 minutes after that first report, a second 911 call came in for a shooting at another home located roughly a three kilometres’ drive away.

When officers arrived at the second location, they found a 45-year-old who had also been shot but was alive. Inside the home, they discovered the bodies of three children – at the ages of 6, 7 and 12 – as well as the body of the 44-year-old shooter, who had suffered a self-inflicted wound. Crime scene tape remained up around the two homes on Tuesday evening.

Sault Ste. Marie Police said Tuesday that because the case was the result of intimate partner violence, they were not releasing the names of the victims or suspect. They also did not release the genders of the victims or suspect.

Police spokesperson Lincoln Louttit told The Canadian Press that investigators had learned more about the shooter through witnesses who came forward – but declined to offer any further details. The police service did not respond to any additional questions about the killings.

“The grief the families, friends and loved ones of the victims are facing is unimaginable. Our hearts go out to them,” police Chief Hugh Stevenson wrote in a statement.

Mayor Matthew Shoemaker echoed those sentiments, calling it “an unspeakable tragedy.”

“There are no words to adequately address such a tremendous loss,’’ he wrote in a statement. “I extend our community’s collective condolences and support to the family and loved ones of the victims. ... We grieve with them as we try to reckon with this inconceivable act of violence.”

Ontario Premier Doug Ford called the news “gut-wrenching,” and said the entire province mourns “this senseless loss of life.”

Last summer, a jury at an inquest into a triple-femicide in rural Ontario made a series of recommendations to the government to prevent intimate partner violence and femicide. The first on the list was that the province should declare intimate partner violence an epidemic. The province has refused – though dozens of municipalities across Ontario have since done so at the local level, and the federal government has also done so in official correspondence.

The pervasiveness of intimate partner violence has been well-documented.

On average, a woman is killed by an intimate partner every six days in Canada. With attempted murders included, the figure becomes one almost every other day.

According to the Ontario Association of Interval and Transition Houses, which puts out a monthly report tracking femicide cases in the province, there have been at least 46 femicide cases confirmed in Ontario so far this year, as of Sept. 30.

Between 2018 and 2022, the Canadian Femicide Observatory for Justice and Accountability has tracked 850 killings of women or girls. In 2022 alone, there were 184 – a number that has been steadily increasing since before the COVID-19 pandemic.

Research into child homicides by the Canadian Domestic Homicide Prevention Initiative found that about 30 children are killed by a parent in Canada each year.

Over the past decade, mothers have been responsible about 40 per cent of the time, and researchers found postpartum depression or mental illness often played a role. In 60 per cent of cases where fathers are the killers, researchers have usually found a history of domestic violence and retaliation against their partner after separation.