NORTHAMPTON, N.B. – The wife of a New Brunswick RCMP officer working in Haiti said she’s worried her husband might be trapped in the rubble of a two-story apartment building he was living in in the country’s capital.
Lisa Gallagher said she last spoke to her husband, Sgt. Mark Gallagher, about 30 minutes before a magnitude 7.0 earthquake struck 15 kilometres west of Port-au-Prince.
She said RCMP officials have told her he is one of two RCMP officers who remains unaccounted for in the devastated country.
“I’m assuming his apartment building has sustained some damage and I just hope he’s not stuck in the rubble,” she said in an interview from their home in Northampton.
“I’m just hoping that if he’s stuck somewhere he can hang on until they get to him.”
Sgt. Pat Flood, an RCMP spokeswoman in Ottawa, confirmed that Gallagher was one of two officers still missing in the capital.
Supt. Doug Coates, who is based in Ottawa, was serving as the acting commissioner of the United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti and was also missing.
The officers were training and mentoring Haitian police.
Lisa Gallagher said her husband had just returned to the impoverished country Tuesday after spending three weeks at their home in New Brunswick during a Christmas break.
She said he was tired from the trip and was heading to bed about a half-hour before the quake, but said she can’t be certain he was in the two-storey apartment downtown at the time.
She believed two other RCMP officers lived in the same apartment complex.
Her husband was based at the collapsed UN compound in the Haitian capital and was doing administrative work for the RCMP.
Lisa Gallagher, who was up through the night trying to get information about her husband, said the night before he left Canada he visited some neighbours who are in the process of adopting two Haitian girls.
“The last thing Mark did the night before he left was to go to their house and get a parcel for those little girls,” she said. “So when he called me he said he was able to get through customs and would be delivering those shoes.”
The officer, who was based in Halifax before going to Haiti, went to the country in July and was due home in April.
Lisa Gallagher, who’s been on the phone to her daughter in Calgary and son in British Columbia, said her husband loved the work he was doing in Haiti.
“We’re just praying,” she said about the wait. “Minutes kind of turn into hours. It’s not easy.”
-By Alison Auld in Halifax
