FREDERICTON, N.B. - Penny Klepick does not plan on changing her jogging route.
Reached late afternoon as she was out for a jog, Klepick first heard the news early Friday morning while she was at work. She lives two blocks away from the 200 block of Brookside Drive, the site of an early morning shooting that claimed the lives of four individuals on Friday morning, including two police officers.
Klepick said her first thoughts were of her husband and two teenage sons.
“I was panicking because I wasn’t at home,” Klepick said.
“You never hear about anything like that around here.”
The neighbourhood is a mix of both medium to low-income rentals, seniors residences and high-income houses, Klepick said, adding the news of the shooting was shocking; crime in the area was almost non-existent. Most of the apartment buildings near the site of the shooting were family dwellings.
“A lot of kids live in those apartment buildings,” she said.
“Very scary.”
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One block down the road from 200 block area is a small strip-mall with a Subway and a Tim Hortons.
Lori Forget, a transit operator, had been on shift for only two hours when she stole into the Tim Hortons on her break. She heard the gunshots from the apartment down the street.
Forget immediately called the news into her dispatch. She was told to keep all the passengers on her bus. No one was to leave.
Most of the passengers worked at a nearby call centre.
"They were all startled. Everybody was startled. This whole city's upset right now. It's terrible. It could be any of us at any time," Forget said.
Comparisons with a 2014 shooting in Moncton are frequently on the mind of many.
Jeff Gamon, co-owner of Scandimodern, a furniture store in downtown Fredericton, said he was surprised when he learned of the shooting, but not shocked. He said news of shootings in other small towns in the United States had numbed the shock for him.
“These things happen all the time everywhere. Now it happened here,” Gamon said with a sad shrug.
Gamon expressed remorse for the two officers and the other two individuals killed.
Klepick said she was determined not to let Friday’s events make her feel less safe in her neighbourhood.
"This isn't going to change how we feel about our city. Fredericton's a strong city, we'll stand together. We will get through it. But it's just so hard to think of the lives that had to be lost because of whatever happened," Klepick said.
