'Officer down,' but not out

July 12, 2022
Laurie White.
Laurie White was a junior RCMP officer when an alleged pedophile shot her lower leg off. She survived and has thrived since then. Photo : Jesse Pound (photographer) and Jenn Pound and Rachel Powell (styling)
 

Sometimes a miracle brings family home for Christmas, and sometimes a nightmare does.

When Laurie White was 28 years old, what she wanted for Christmas was to be with her family in Brockville, Ont. As a junior RCMP officer in Kitimat, B.C., she lacked seniority, so White had scheduled time off in early December to visit family, and that’s what was on her mind on the morning of Nov. 27, 1998. It was a normal day, perhaps busy in that giddy, pre-vacation way, until everything went dark and a bullet changed her life.

White had joined the RCMP two years earlier. She had a degree in physical education from Brock University and a master’s from the University of Ottawa, and worked as a substitute teacher, figure-skating instructor and aerobics coach, but had trouble finding a steady, career-oriented job. A friend suggested the RCMP, and soon enough, Const. White had her first posting, in Kitimat.

“I had no idea where it was,” she recalls. “I had to look it up on a map.”

She’d been on the job for a little more than two years, and lately had been investigating an alleged pedophile. “I was anxious to get that done” before the “early celebration with my family” back in Brockville, she says. And so, on that day in November, with two fellow officers and an arrest warrant in hand, she drove to a townhouse where the alleged offender lived.

Twenty-four years later, the details remain seared in her memory. It was a brisk, bright day and young children played in the townhouse green space. Cautiously, the three officers approached the unit cited on the warrant.

“I was standing to the right of the door under the car park and one of my partners was to the left of the door, and the third one was around the back. No one answered the door when we knocked — we weren’t sure he was there,” she says.

“Suddenly, I heard a loud pop. My ears started to ring really loudly, and I couldn’t hear anything. I saw a hole in the white door and I smelled the familiar smell of gunpowder and I could taste the residue and particles in my mouth. Then I looked down and saw smoke coming from my leg, and I realized that I’d been shot.”

The pedophile had fired a blast from a sawed-off .303 rifle through the door. “That kind of bullet, once it hits something hard, like my shin bone, it kind of mushrooms, so it took most of my calf with it,” she says. “It broke both of the bones in my lower leg, then it exited out the back and shredded my calf muscle and all the tissue back there.”

She had no idea of the extent of the damage and initially felt no pain, as her partner “grabbed me by my collar and gun belt and dragged me around a neighbouring vehicle to get me out of the line of fire.” He radioed in a “10-33,” which means an officer is down.

Paramedics arrived and “raced in on foot, with no stretcher or anything like that, just to quickly remove me. One grabbed me underneath my knees and one grabbed me underneath my armpits. As they leapt this big ditch, I remember my leg dangling.”

Before she finally succumbed to shock at the hospital, “I remember them cutting off my clothes, I remember them making arrangements for the Medevac, and asking for my parents' [phone numbers].

“One person said to me in the emergency room, ‘Laurie, do you have any dying declarations?’ I remember patting my torso and my belly area and thinking, ‘Have I been shot somewhere else and I’m just not aware and I actually am dying?’ I kept willing myself not to close my eyes, because I was fearful of closing my eyes and never opening them again.”

She was transported to Vancouver General Hospital, where she opened her eyes after eight hours of surgery and many blood transfusions to be told her leg had been amputated below the knee.

“I couldn’t even comprehend what that meant,” says White. “I was overwhelmed and in disbelief, so I didn’t actually look at what was left of my leg for several days. I couldn’t bring myself to do it… All the things I had worked for and trained for professionally — it’s all gone.”

There began a long series of follow-up surgeries and rehab, and a stark realization that it wasn’t just a matter of fitting a prosthetic leg and learning to walk again.

“I wanted to learn how to skate again, and ride a bike and rollerblade and do all the things that I used to do previously. What I didn’t realize was that I had to re-learn every little thing, everything didn’t just fall back into place once I learned to walk.”

Incredibly, barely a year later and after rigorous RCMP testing, she was back in Kitimat doing “exactly the same job I had been doing.” She was told at the time that she was the first person with a prosthetic leg to perform unrestricted police duties for the force.

Eventually, she had to scale back her duties, but she prospered. She had two children, now teenagers, moved to Vancouver and memorably worked on security for the 2010 Paralympics. Throughout, she had support from Veterans Affairs Canada, including therapy, and, since her retirement in 2020, benefits for medical care related to her on-the-job injury.

“I’m very grateful to them for their support over the years because they’ve been very, very helpful for me,” she says.

Last year, she published a book, titled 10-33: An Officer Down Steps Back Up, about the affair. “It does still sometimes shock me,” she says, “even though it’s been so long.”

Many lives changed that day, she says. Her assailant shot himself to death after a 10-hour standoff with police. Meanwhile, after her first few weeks in hospital, White was able to fly home to Brockville “to be with my family for a very weird Christmas."

“I did get Christmas off that year, even though I wasn’t supposed to.”

 

This article appeared in the summer 2022 issue of our in-house magazine, Sage. While you’re here, why not download the full issue and peruse our back issues too?