CORNWALL, P.E.I. – RCMP officers surrounding a house with police dogs and rifles drawn was not a scene Karen Forrest expected to see in her neighbourhood.
Forrest is a member of Cornwall’s Citizens on Patrol, so she’s aware of some of the town’s problem areas.
The house across the street from her is not one of those places.
“It’s a quiet residential street, so it was a little alarming to look out the window and see all these cop cars and police with rifles,” she said. “This is not a war zone.”
Police said they responded to an “incident” at a home on MacKinley Crescent in Cornwall at around 5:30 p.m. Thursday.
The RCMP’s Sherry MacDougall would not provide any further details Thursday night, other than to say there was no threat to public safety and things were resolved without incident. She would not say whether any arrests were made.
A cruiser blocked vehicles from accessing the street from the York Point Road, while a second sat partway down the crescent to halt traffic coming from the opposite direction.
The house sits four in from the York Point Road on the right hand side.
Forrest’s house is across the street from where she first noticed the officers and police dogs congregating just after 5:30 p.m.
She hadn’t heard any kind of disturbance before noticing the police presence. In fact, she was working on her upstairs computer at the time and didn’t know anything was amiss until her brother came home and asked about the commotion on the street.
There were at least two officers with rifles drawn, she said, and four or five others – some in plainclothes – who appeared to be speaking with someone in the house across the street from her.
One officer used a bullhorn to speak with a person inside the home, calling the person by name, which Forrest couldn’t make out.
“(The officer) kept repeating something to the effect of, ‘Please come out the front door with nothing in your hands.’ He kept repeating that every minute or two,” she said.
Forrest has lived in the neighbourhood for a year but doesn't know the residents at the neighbouring house other than seeing them in passing.
“My next-door neighbours have been living here for years and they’ve never told me of any concerns about the people across the street,” she said.
Just after 6 p.m., the officers began to disperse from the scene. Forrest did not see anyone emerge from the home and wasn’t able to say whether anyone was taken into custody.
While she was relieved things seemed to be resolved safely, it was still disconcerting to see such a scene unfold from her front window.
