A section of the 106 around Frosty Hollow was closed off by RCMP on Tuesday morning, as police located and arrested a man in relation to a disturbance in Moncton earlier in the morning.
Sackville and Codiac police had been searching a wide area spanning from Dorchester to Jolicure before locating the 36-year-old man in Frosty Hollow.
Codiac police staff sergeant Dave MacDonnell tells CHMA that the incident began with a call of a disturbance and threats involving a firearm in the Lutz Street area of Moncton at 6:15am. A man and a woman fled the scene before police arrived. The woman was then located and arrested at a hotel on Dieppe Blvd.
“The investigation then led police to believe that the male suspect was located in the region surrounding Sackville and Dorchester, including Wood Point and Jolicure,” says MacDonnell. The RCMP issued warnings on social media about the operation, but did not issue an Alert Ready message, which would go directly to cell phones in designated areas.
“The situation did not meet the criteria for a radio alert or an Alert Ready message,” says MacDonnell. “However, police were ready to issue one should there have been a need.”
Police did alert the Anglophone East School District of the operation at around 10:30am, and schools in Sackville and Dorchester were put on “hold and secure” until the operation was complete, shortly after 11am. “Hold and secure” means no-one is permitted to enter or exit the school, but activity within the school can continue as normal.
MacDonnell says that at about 11am, “the suspect was located and arrested without incident near a residence on route 106 in Frosty Hollow.” No injuries were sustained during the search and/or arrests, he says.
“The RCMP believe this to be an isolated incident and that there is no risk to the general public at this time,” says MacDonnell. He also said police would remain in the area of Dieppe and Frosty Hollow as part of the ongoing investigation.
Frosty Hollow resident Wendy Epworth only noticed the police action in her neighbourhood after friends and family alerted her on social media that her road had been blocked off by police.
“I was just at my home office doing some work and then my husband and I started getting messages, people asking if we were okay,” says Epworth. Once she looked out her window, Epworth noticed a car pull into a neighbouring, unoccupied property. Knowing the road had been blocked off, she decided to call the Sackville RCMP detachment to let them know. While she was on the phone with an officer, a number of RCMP vehicles arrived and the officer informed her that an arrest had been made.
“There was a lot of activity,” says Epworth. “There were police in camouflage and with rifles, we heard police dogs barking, and there was a drone.”
Epworth says two cars were towed off the property, one that had been parked there the previous night, and a second which she believes was the one she saw pull in.
Epworth says the officer she spoke to on the phone assured her that “everything was okay and that we were safe.” But she says she would have appreciated an officer coming to her residence to inform her that the lone suspect was arrested.
“We have a lot of woods behind us, and the lot next door, there would be all kinds of places for people to be hiding,” she says. “It would have been nice for them to come and speak to us, for sure.”
Correction: A previous version of this story identified Lutes Road as the area of the initial RCMP call, and has been corrected.