Rob Anderson was working for CN police in the summer of 2024 when he came across Colin Hough, shot and fatally wounded, lying in the middle of a rural road near Calgary.
When help arrived, Anderson rode with Hough in the ambulance. At the hospital, the dying man’s phone rang. The screen on the phone showed a family with two young kids.
Anderson didn’t pick up.
“I wanted to,” Anderson told court Wednesday at the trial of Arthur Penner and Elijah Strawberry.
“(But) if I answered that call, I was pretty confident that was his spouse, and I wasn’t willing to deliver this kind of news to her.”
Soon after, Hough died.
Penner, 37, and Strawberry, 29, have pleaded not guilty to second-degree murder and attempted murder.
The trial has heard Hough, 45, worked for Rocky View County when he was shot on Aug. 6, 2024.
Crown prosecutor Photini Papadatou has told the jury that she intends to prove Hough was killed in a series of chain-reaction crimes that began with a stolen vehicle.
At first, she said, the accused men pulled off to the side of a road to try to swap out a stolen truck for a power company truck used by Matthew Andres.
Andres has testified that he was doing survey work by the road when two men drove up, shot him in the arm and demanded the keys to his vehicle.
Andres said he ran into a field to hide. Court heard the two men then set fire to the first truck before trying to drive off in the power company vehicle, but they got stuck.
At that point, the Crown said, Hough drove up looking to perhaps lend a hand. He was shot multiple times before he staggered into the middle of the road and collapsed, and the two men drove off in his truck.
Jurors were shown dashcam footage of a white Dodge truck engulfed in flames and a man lying in the middle of the road.
Anderson, a former paramedic who now works for the RCMP, told court he rushed to scene after seeing a plume of black smoke.
At first, he thought there had been a traffic accident.
“As I got much closer to the intersection, I observed a body lying almost exactly in the centre of that,” Anderson said. “I believe I reached down and I spoke to him. It was obvious to me he was critically injured, and there wasn’t a lot I was going to be able to do.”
Anderson said RCMP officers arrived and they began CPR. He stayed with Hough until he died three hours later.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published May 6, 2026.