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Hey, it's Nancy. Before we begin today, I just wanted to let you know that you can listen to Crime Beat early and ad-free on Amazon Music, included with Prime. On a cool spring evening in May of 2022, Calgary families in the quiet community of Radisson Heights were busy getting ready for bed. But about an hour before midnight, a violent and chaotic sequence of events unfolded.
A gray car and a red pickup truck were reported to be driving erratically when shots rang out. The driver of the car was hit by a bullet. The red truck took off at speeds surpassing 150 kilometers an hour, more than three times the speed limit. Seconds later, a deadly crash. He took this person away who is...
Who was loved by so, so many people. Hug your loved ones, man. Make sure they know that you love them. Bloody hell, you never know if tomorrow's going to be there. I'm Nancy Hixt, a senior crime reporter for Global News. Today on Crime Beat, I share the story of Angela McKenzie, a mother of five whose life was senselessly taken and the hunt for the man responsible. This is Gone in an Instant.
From the moment Angela McKenzie was born, she loved unconditionally, always putting others' needs before her own. Her mother, Sylvia, said they were best friends. What Angela was like? She was my partner. She did everything with me. Angela's parents immigrated from Germany in the early 70s and owned and operated popular paintball and laser tag businesses in Calgary.
As she grew up, she kept her parents on their toes. A handful, yeah. Yeah, she came into Laser Tag one time. I said, can you come up and help me with the Laser Tag? And she said, yeah, right away. And she came up and she had this clean, clean Kool-Aid here with still some Kool-Aid running down her.
Angela was in her 20s when she first met Jeff Poirier. So I was, I want to say 20 years old and was looking through the paper and found a wanted ad for, you know, somebody to come work. And it said for a paintball company, 20 years old. Hey, why not? Let's go try it out. Showed up and the boss man gave me an interview and, you know, did all the all the normal stuff.
And by the end of it, he looked at me and says, you know, you seem like a great fit for us. But on one condition, I'll hire you. You have to stay away from my daughter. So I did what the man asked. Jeff worked for the family for more than a decade. In the meantime, Angela got married and became a mother. She had five children, two sons and three daughters, including a set of twins.
I knew every one of the kids from the day they were born because the father I actually was friends with as well because he worked at paintball with me and Ang. And then boss man got sick and basically everything started to close down because just couldn't manage to do it properly, right? And we all lost contact for a while. As she grieved the loss of her father, Angela's focus became her children. They were everything for her.
She was doing great. She was a mom. She made sure everything was right. She was doing volunteers at school. She was volunteering with that school and going to this. And she had everything lined up just perfectly. Her mother, Sylvia, became affectionately known as "Oma," which is German for grandmother. Oh, we talked every day. Yeah.
The kids would sometimes phone me up in the afternoon and say, "Can mom bring us up to your house today?" And I said, "Well, I get home at five." "Well, okay, we start supper." So they're in my house already starting supper. Before I even get home, this is how we, how close we were.
Saturday night was a game night, you know, like we played cards, we played board games, you know, like we had supper, we ate junk food, you know, like we had fun. Angela became a single mother when she separated from her husband. He later passed away. She worked and volunteered at her church and the kids' school.
And then, Angela found love again when she reconnected with an old family friend, Jeff Poirier. I still periodically talk to Oma, Sylvia, because I do mechanics. So she'd call me if she had a car problem, and I'd go fix her car. Well, I had just fixed her car probably a week before Angie's van broke down.
And she called her mom, said that, you know, the van's broken down. What do I do? And Sylvia said, well, you're close to Jeff's house. Give him a call. So that's what she did. She called me up and as soon as I answered the phone, I heard her voice and she said, how are you? You know, the basics. And then, do you know who you're talking to? And I says, of course I do. I never forget this voice.
And I says, "What's up?" She told me what was wrong. I went down, seen her and showed up. And we hadn't seen each other in, I don't know, at least five, six years. And as soon as I seen her, it was like nothing had changed. You know, she was still the same person. I was still the same person. And we were just right back to where we were when we used to work together. So, and we kind of went inseparable from there. - Jeff said it all happened very quickly and soon they were engaged.
That was more of a random, like there was never a ring or anything, you know, transpired. She got my initials tattooed on her ring finger. And it was just one of those things where we were talking about it one day, you know, about where the future might lead us and so on and so forth. And I just basically, you know, nonchalantly looked at her and says, so if I was to ask you to marry me, what would you say? And she's like, I'd say yes. I'll take that as my answer.
And that was pretty much how it went. There was no official like down on the one knee or anything like that. It was like, all right, that's what we're doing. You know, you're now my fiance and we're going to work it out and we'll figure it out. We'll get the wedding together. But Jeff and Angela never got a chance to plan their wedding. Without warning, their whirlwind romance came to a devastating and abrupt end on May 10th, 2022. That night, the kids had stayed at home.
and me and Ange were just out with some friends of ours and we were gonna go to dinner but I had a really wicked migraine and so I just went back to my mom and dad's to sit down on the couch and relax and take some pain meds.
She left me there about 11 o'clock. You know, I was laying on the couch with a cold cloth on my head and she said, I love you. I said, I love you. And she walked up the stairs and that was the last time I seen her. Angela met up with some friends, then started her drive home to her five kids.
Unbeknownst to her, danger was headed in her direction. We received reports of kind of two erratic drivers on 36th Street. And then specifically that a red truck seemed to be chasing a smaller sedan type vehicle. That's Calgary Police Homicide Detective Regan Hossack. She said moments later, shots were fired. Screams
Bullets pierced through the walls of nearby homes. Miraculously, no occupants were hit, but bullet holes marked the close call. So both vehicles are traveling southbound on 36th Street from Memorial Drive. And at some point, the red truck is able to pull up next to the gray sedan. The occupant of that truck shoots at the gray sedan and then flees that shooting.
36th Street is a main thoroughfare that runs through the east side of Calgary and passes through both industrial and residential areas of the city. The driver of the grey car was hit. He lost control and hit another moving vehicle from behind. The red truck took off at high speeds. What happened next was captured by several surveillance cameras in the area.
In the footage, you see Angela driving her van northbound on 36th Street. As she turned left to go west, the red truck sped through the intersection. Angela's van was violently struck. The van was hit on the passenger side and was sent reeling across to the southwest corner of the intersection onto the sidewalk.
Police and EMS arrived within minutes, but it was too late. Angela McKenzie died at the scene. Her fiancé, Jeff, was still nursing a migraine at his parents' home when he realized he hadn't heard from Angela. She always messaged me to tell me when she got home, right? Even if it was a quick 30-second, "I'm home. Good night. Love you." Whatever, right?
Which was very rare that it was that short. But yeah, I didn't get that text. She's not answering her phone. Normally she would answer her phone or send a text or whatever, right? Jeff went to look for her. He retraced Angela's route home from his parents' place. Then, about three kilometers away... That's when I seen all the police lights on the intersection.
and I couldn't go up 17th. So I went down onto one of the back roads and then came around the circumference of the intersection. And as I was crossing 36th, a block and a half down, is I noticed her van sitting in front of the bank. Found the closest officer that was standing there and I asked him, I says, "Where is the woman that was driving that van?"
And he says, "How do you know it's a woman?" I says, "Because that's my fiance's van. I know it's a woman. Where is she?" And that's when he informed me that she didn't make it past the scene. I knew that I was going to have to be the one that was going to tell Sylvia. I couldn't let a police officer do that. So I tried to get whatever information I could. That way I could relay whatever information I was able to when I told Oma. So I was there for a bit. I think, I don't know, a couple hours maybe.
And then once I had calmed down enough, I got in my car and I drove over to Sylvia's place and I knocked on the door. And that was probably one of the hardest things I've ever had to do, other than telling the kids. That morning, Jeff and Oma Sylvia gathered Angela's five children on the couch to tell them what happened. From that point on, me and Oma took a crash course in co-parenting and parenting.
Meanwhile, police from several units arrived at the scene.
Originally, the Calgary Police Guns and Gangs Unit took charge of the investigation, given the shooting that preceded the devastating crash. They also brought in the Calgary Police Collision Reconstruction Team and Constable Robert Tell.
My job is to attend either fatal or very serious collisions and to look at the physical evidence at the scene. I don't talk to witnesses, I don't listen to what the drivers say. My job is purely to determine by what I can see on the roadway, what I can see on the vehicles and any information that I can get from those vehicles as to what happened.
Constable Tell told me on newer vehicles, they can find out a lot of information from the airbag module. As you're driving down the road day in, day out, the airbag control module in your car is waiting for you to get involved in a crash. That's its only purpose, right? So it's constantly recording information, but it only buffers a certain amount of information. When a crash happens, it locks information from the previous five seconds to that deployment event.
So you get five seconds of information and that five seconds can include vehicle speed, whether the brake switch is on, the service brake, steering angle, yaw rate, the accelerator position. And there's different vehicle manufacturers have different types of information they record. But generally we get speed, whether the brakes are on or off and steering and that types of stuff.
In this case, police got a warrant to download data from the red truck. I was able to determine that at five seconds prior to the crash, the Chevy Silverado was traveling at 155 kilometers an hour. Now, it was increasing its speed at that point because the accelerator pedal was at 99%, which is almost full to the floor, right? So
The speed did increase and actually increased to 157 kilometers an hour at one time. And then at that point, which I think was about three seconds prior to the collision, the accelerator came off and at one and a half seconds the brake went on. For reference, the speed limit on 36th Street is 50 kilometers an hour.
That means the red truck was going more than three times the posted limit at the moment of impact. Constable Tell said given the high speed of the red truck, Angela McKenzie wouldn't have known her life was in danger when she entered the intersection. She felt that she had sufficient time to clear the intersection, but the truck was traveling at such a high rate of speed that it closed the distance
The officer said the speed would also impact the red pickup truck's ability to stop. At the point when the brake pedal was depressed, the vehicle speed had dropped to 132 kilometers an hour. But the vehicle is traveling at 37 meters per second at that point. And if you think a basketball court is about 29 meters long, so the car is traveling in one second more than a whole basketball court. So...
We speak a lot in collision terms about perception reaction times. So the human body is not an autonomous machine, we're not robotic. We cannot instantly see something and then apply the brake. It takes our brain time to go, "Something happens. What do I do? Now I need to do something about it." So there's what we call perception reaction time. So at one and a half seconds prior to the impact,
I can say that at that point, I believe the driver of that vehicle had perceived that there was a problem and his decision to deal with that was to put his foot on the foot brake. But of course, at that speed, he's unable to bring that vehicle to a stop in that distance. The evidence they gathered changed the course of the investigation. Let me be very clear.
The actions and behavior of these individuals led to the death of a woman we believe to be completely innocent in this matter. Angela McKenzie's death was deemed a homicide. He took this person away who was loved by so, so many people. It was so useless. There was no reason to any of that.
and the man believed to be responsible was nowhere to be found. So we believe that there are people out there that know the whereabouts of the accused and that potentially assisted him in some way of evading arrest and fleeing a jurisdiction. That's next time on Crime Beat.
Crime Beat is written and produced by me, Nancy Hixt, with producer Dila Velasquez. Audio editing and sound design is by Rob Johnston. Special thanks to photographer-editor Danny Lantella for his work on this episode. I also want to welcome the newest member of our team, Jesse Wisner, our Crime Beat production assistant.
And thanks to Chris Bassett, the VP of Network Content, Production and Distribution and Editorial Standards for Global News.
I would love to have you tell a friend about this podcast, and you can help me share these important stories by rating and reviewing Crime Beat on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen. You can find me on Twitter at Nancy Hixt, on Facebook at Nancy Hixt Crime Beat, and on Instagram at nancy.hixt. That's N-A-N-C-Y dot H-I-X-T. Thanks again for listening. Please join me next time.