February 1, 2022 Mass Casualty Commission: RE: Inquiry I am writing to you today on behalf of my entire family. To say that we are dissatisfied with the process that has taken over what should be a “public inquiry”, would be an understatement. We have spent over 21 months living in the reality of this tremendous loss and, to be frank, your job is not to live in it with us. Your job is to take the time, and put in the effort, to discover what happened on April 18 and 19 of 2020. You are failing. Not only are you failing the living victims of these crimes, but you are also failing the public, our province, and this country. The fact is you are not giving us the information we need. You are not giving our Counsel the right to cross examine any of your hand-picked witnesses. You have spent the better part of a year paying lip service to anyone who will listen, and we have no real answers. The answers we have to date did not come from the Commission. Any answers afforded to us are completely vague and we have no idea what our part, if any, is in this Inquiry. The day I met the Commissioners, Chief Justice Macdonald looked at me and said, “You may not always like what I have to say but I will always be honest.” It is incredibly hard to have feelings about anything the Commissioners have to say when they are completely nonexistent in every point of this process. You are adding to the trauma of my family. You are not helping. You are hurting. How can you possibly call this a “Trauma Informed Inquiry” when you only add to the trauma by keeping us in the dark and acting as if we have no right to know what’s going on? When I sit and try to think about this from the point of view of a community member, I am mortified that it seems as though the best interest of our communities are not at heart here. Instead, it seems as if the integrity of an organization that really lacked integrity from the beginning seems to be the only thing you take interest in. I need to remind you that you are here to find out why things happened the way they did. From where I sit, it feels like you are trying to make this go away. I personally marched the streets to make this Inquiry happen. The voices of the members of this province and country are what made the government change its mind. I have put every ounce of the woman I am into making sure my Mother did not die in vain. That she is remembered for the wonderful way she lived and not the horrible way she died. That is my job. Yours is to figure out why this happened and to allow us to ask questions when something doesn’t add up. When I sum up the experience, I have had thus far, with members of the Commission support staff, and Commission Counsel I don’t have great things to say. Your support staff are cold. One lady even addressed a family member by my Mother’s name. You would think at the very least, they would know the names of the victims lost in this horrible event. I am not saying people do not make mistakes, what I am saying is, when you have a bad taste left in your mouth repeatedly by the same people chances are it’s not a good situation. This situation has been nothing but more heartache for our entire family. You asked if we had any comments for the Commission when this became public, and my only comment is this. I would like to formally apologize to the public and the other living victims of this massacre for putting so much, time, energy, and faith into this and believing that it would be conducted with tact, accuracy, and the ability to ask questions. I am sorry that I was such an advocate for an Inquiry that obviously has it’s own agenda, but more than that, I would like to apologize to my Mother, because my only goal was to make sure the mistakes made that day, the day she died, did not go unanswered and no other family ever has to suffer the same fate. Today I sit here, only feeling like I failed the one woman who never failed me. I made a mistake, I believed in a very broken system that cannot work if it does not realize it needs to be fixed from the inside out. Darcy Dobson The O’Brien Family.