On Saturday, police identified Mathew and Isaac Auchterlonie, 22, as the two men killed after trying to rob a bank in Saanich, British Columbia. The brothers entered a Bank of Montreal branch Tuesday morning wearing black clothing and body armor. Almost 20 people were in the bank at the time. “The energy from them was completely calm,” Shelli Fryer, who was there for a meeting with the branch manager, told CTV News. “When they spoke, it was in hushed voices.” When the police arrived, a chaotic fight ensued as the brothers left the bank. The twins were killed in the encounter and six police officers were injured, three of them with serious gunshot wounds. “At first I thought it was fireworks so I ran to the window and looked out. And it was just a hail of bullets going everywhere and the police had locked the whole place down,” Christopher Lee Ford, who lives in the area, told Victoria’s Capital Daily. He and his family took shelter in their dining room. “I saw two police officers get shot.” Police ordered businesses and residents to evacuate the area after multiple explosive devices were discovered, shutting down the area for several days. “This is something that rocks a community,” Saanich Police Chief Dean Duthie told reporters in the hours after the shooting. But the brothers’ actions during the robbery left the victims searching for answers. “I just don’t know what they wanted. What did they expect?’ Fryer said. “They had taken all the money. They could have just taken the money and left right away. They would be in and out before the police got there.” Despite arriving at the bank heavily armed and with a cache of explosives, police say neither brother had a criminal record and were not previously known to police. But Isaac Auchterlonie’s Instagram account, which has since been taken down, chronicled a growing hostility toward the federal government and a fixation on firearms. Interspersed throughout the account were images of the young man shooting rifles in the woods and praises of past famous bank robberies. One post shared clips from a documentary about the North Hollywood shooting, a 1997 bank robbery in which two heavily armed men injured more than a dozen people during a standoff with police. Other posts referred to a clash between the Irish Republican Army and British soldiers and police, as well as the Waco siege, when federal officers and soldiers stormed a Branch Davidian religious compound in Texas in 1993. Auchterlonie also voiced his strong opposition to the Covid-19 vaccination as well as recent gun control legislation proposed by the federal government. “When they’re trying to make a vaccine and they’re also trying to get guns,” the post read, followed by the hashtags #tryandtakeit and #getwhatyoudeserve and #fuckyoutrudeau, in reference to the prime minister. Subscribe to First Edition, our free daily newsletter – every morning at 7am. BST He also used the hashtags #tyranny, #donttreadonme and “tyrantrepellent #tryandtakeit” when he posted images of guns. Nearly a week after the shooting, police have yet to release a timeline of events, including who fired first. “There are still many questions and investigative efforts that need to be done in order to fully understand what happened and why,” Cpl Alex Bérubé told a press conference on Saturday. “The motive behind the armed robbery and subsequent shootout with police has yet to be determined.”
