Time to Heal

Retired paramedic Lisa Jennings advocates for first responders with mental-health injuries.

- Jackie Wong

ON THE MORNING OF APRIL 5, 1996, Hardeep Dhaliwal answered the phone, as he’s done thousands of times. A dispatch supervisor in B.C.’s interior, he’s spent 37 years fielding emergency calls from people needing ambulance services. This time, a little girl was on the line from Vernon.

“She described hearing gunshots and going outside to witness victims lying on the ground, bleeding,” he recalls. Dhaliwal kept her on the phone as he sent paramedics to a neighbouring home, where people had gathered in preparation for a wedding. The abusive ex-husband of the bride’s sister had shot and killed his former partner and eight of her relatives before taking his own life. It was the second-deadliest mass murder in recent Canadian history, after the École Polytechnique massacre.