Crouched in a locked office deep inside the OC Transpo bus garage, with two men dying on the floor and a madman somewhere upstairs, David Hallorin yells his only question: "Are they coming soon or not?"
His voice is high-pitched with panic. He has just watched his co-workers blasted with a rifle at close range, and the gunman knows where he is.
Claude Brazeau, who is whispering answers in French to the 911 operator, tells him to keep his voice down, to stop talking. He repeats what the operator says: the police tactical unit -- "the GI Joes," the operator calls them -- are on their way. "We've got to be patient," Mr. Brazeau says.
And for nearly two hours, they waited for help in the dark, Mr. Brazeau on the telephone, Mr. Hallorin watching the door, knowing the killer was near.
Why it took police that long to reach them, to get medical aid to the fallen men -- even to get good directions to their location -- has become the focus of the coroner's inquest into the shooting at the OC Transpo garage. A portion of the recording of Mr. Brazeau's 911 call was heard yesterday.
The second-guessing of judgment calls and protocol is inevitable, and so easy in an orderly courtroom eight months removed from the chaos of April 6, 1999. Police arrived at the bus garage that afternoon to find hundreds of people fleeing and a man inside named Pierre Lebrun, described by a co-worker as "paranoid with the world" and for all they knew still alive with the rifle.
But the jury was offered at least two bits of interesting information yesterday: The tactical unit was sent into the building without a real map and no idea where to head, although it had been a full 60 minutes since the first shot was fired. And the police did not make contact with Mr. Brazeau, their only link to what was happening inside, until at least 40 minutes after he called the operator, offering a description of the gunman and details on his whereabouts. Staff Sergeant Mike Ryan testified that police were waiting for a negotiator to arrive and take the call.
Mr. Brazeau stayed on the phone for at least an hour and a half. With the operator, he stays calm, swearing only softly under his breath.
By the time he first saw Mr. Lebrun at the office door, two men had already been killed. Mr. Lebrun fired one shot at Clare Davidson, who was sitting at a computer, and a second into David Lemay.
On the portion of the 911 tape played yesterday, Mr. Brazeau and Mr. Hallorin feed the operator all the details they can. They tell her what Mr. Lebrun was wearing, what kind of gun he carried, and where they believed he'd gone: to a newly built loft above the office with a clear view of the engine room.
Police now believe that Mr. Lebrun did all his killing in about five minutes. That would mean that Mr. Lebrun likely lifted the rifle to his own chest and fired in the first few minutes of Mr. Brazeau's 911 call.
But Mr. Hallorin, Mr. Lemay and the police plotting from a fish store across the street had no way of knowing that.
The tactical unit arrived at 3:10, about 30 minutes after the first shot. They were delayed because the team on duty was at the courthouse on witness protection, but some officers were at a meeting at the police station. They threw their gear in their vans and took the call.
They did not enter the building until 3:43, around the time one of the negotiators first spoke to Mr. Brazeau. People were still leaving the building, Staff Sgt. Ryan testified. The unit had only vague instructions to look for the gunman in an "elevated area" and a map hand-drawn by an OC Transpo security guard.
By the time one of the members of the unit left the building to get a real map, further delaying the search, police had more detailed information from Mr. Brazeau.
An hour later, they found Mr. Lebrun's first victim, Brian Guay, lying in a corridor. Five minutes later, they unlocked the office where Mr. Brazeau and Mr. Hallorin were hiding. Their co-workers were dead, as was a fourth man, Harry Schoenmakers.
Mr. Lebrun's body was found in the loft above the office. He'd been dead, the police now believe, for about two hours -- since long before the tactical unit arrived at the bus garage.