Clinton Ellison ran for his life and hid in the woods for more than four hours after discovering his brother shot to death along a road in Portapique on Saturday night.
Corrie Ellison of Truro was among 22 people killed by a gunman during a 13-hour rampage throughout Colchester and Hants counties.
His brother gave a harrowing account of the ordeal in an interview with CBC Newsworld on Wednesday.
“I’m still in shock so bad, I can barely function,” Clinton Ellison told a reporter after being allowed to retrieve his vehicle from the area where the carnage began.
“I’m getting no sleep. I’m shaking like a leaf. I’m terrified. … This scarred me for life.”
The Halifax man said he and his brother were visiting their father in Portapique when they heard a single gunshot and then saw a glow in the sky from a fire.
His brother left the house to check out what was going on. When he didn’t come back, Ellison grabbed a flashlight and went looking for him.
“I could see a body laying on the side of the road,” Ellison said. “As I got closer, I could see it was my brother. I got one more step closer and I could see blood and he wasn’t moving.
“I shut my flashlight off, I turned around and I ran for my life in the dark. I went up the first cottage road. … I turned around and looked down towards the road I had just run from to see a little flashlight flashing around looking for me.
“I ran so hard into the woods. I laid there for … at least four hours hoping and praying that police would come. Finally … they got me out of there with an armoured vehicle.”
“It was the most terrifying thing I have ever experienced in my life. To walk up and find my brother dead and to be hunted by this fellow that killed all these people, I’ll be traumatized for the rest of my life. I’m having a really hard time with this.”
He said he waited an hour before even taking his cellphone out to call his father.
“I didn’t want it to light up and give my position away,” he said of his phone.
“When I thought it was safe, I phoned my dad and told him, ‘phone the police, phone the police. … Corrie’s shot dead. Shut the lights off and hide.’”
Ellison said it was freezing cold in the woods and he was treated for hypothermia at the Great Village firehall after he was evacuated by police.
He said his brother Corrie liked to help people. “He wanted to go and see how bad the fire was, and it cost him his life,” he said.
Ellison said he did not know the shooter. “I don’t what the circumstances were behind that gentleman going off like that,” he said.
He said a lot of people were already on edge because of the COVID-19 pandemic, "and now a lot of people are gonna be living on edge and living in fear.”
Ellison was critical of the RCMP response to the situation.
“I was watching the news earlier; it really made me sick to my stomach that they didn’t put the emergency alert out,” he said. “If the police had have put the emergency alert out, I would have got it on my phone hiding in the woods and I would have known what was going on. And it could have saved some more lives.
“The police could have handled this definitely a lot better.
“I hid in the woods for about four hours, staring up the sky, freezing to death, looking for red flashing lights that never came - for hours, hours.
“People were in there burning to death and dying and it took hours for a response. That’s not right. That’s not right at all.”
When he was taken to the firehall, Ellison said he observed more police personnel “than they knew what to do with. They were all standing around while people were dying.
“It’s your job to serve and protect, … not sit back and watch while people are being killed. I would have (gone) in there. I went up looking for my brother. I didn’t have a bulletproof vest, I never had a gun, but I went. They should have too.”
Ellison was shaken by what he saw Wednesday when he was escorted to his vehicle.
“It’s a trail of destruction – numerous burnt homes, numerous burnt cars,” he said of the scene. “It’s horrible, something right out of a horror movie, worse than a horror movie. This is real life and it (came) to our friends and family. This is a total nightmare.”
