Rory Heppner (right) with his wife Chelsea in Logan Lake, 2022.

Image Credit: SUBMITTED/ Facebook

A Logan Lake resident is having a hard time sleeping and his wife is having panic attacks after the family endured a traumatic event at their home earlier this week.

Rory Heppner had just arrived home from a night shift at the local copper mine on Tuesday at 4:30 a.m. when he was confronted, punched and chased by a strange man.

“My dogs started barking so I let them outside,” Heppner said. “Right after that the alarm on my wife’s car started going off. I turned it off and came back inside. As I shut the door the horn started going off again. I went outside again and a man got out of her car and demanded I give him a ride.”

Heppner said the man came from VisionQuest, a supportive recovery housing facility just outside Logan Lake, and a few kilometres away from his house. Heppner doesn’t think it is safe to have the facility there unless the city is able to make more police services available for faster response times.

“I told him to get off my property as my kids and wife were inside and he started coming towards me,” Heppner said. “I closed and locked the door and phoned my father who lives close by, and told my wife to call the cops.”

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Worried for the safety of his family, Heppner stepped outside and told the man to leave again.

“He came towards me, followed me and punched me in the head,” he said. “I ran around the yard as he chased me and I can still hear my wife and kids screaming. I was looking for a weapon as he was clearly not right and a fair bit bigger than me.”

Heppner said he found a shovel just as his dad showed up holding a fence post and the two thought it would intimidate the man into leaving.

“The man took his shirt off and tried to fight us both and I gave him a few hits with the shovel. He wouldn’t stay down until he was clubbed with a fence post. We held him on the ground for over an hour waiting for police. He kept threatening to kill us and trying to grab rocks.”

Heppner said because Logan Lake does not have many police officers, police had to come from Merritt.

“We didn’t have any cops on duty to give us immediate help,” Heppner said. “I worry this could have happened when I was at work. My neighbours are mostly seniors who are not able to defend themselves. They have been broken into and robbed, and this isn’t the first run-in we’ve had in the six months since we have been here.”

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Heppner said his wife has anxiety when he leaves for work and he is considering taking time off, which will cost him needed wages. His seven-year-old son witnessed the incident.

“The scariest part is the police can’t guarantee me the man won’t go back to VisionQuest,” he said. “They will hold him until Friday and issue him a non-contact order. They said they cannot guarantee anything. People who stay at the facility are there voluntarily, the facility is not allowed to detain them.

“If we are going to have a facility like this close to our town we need more resources to handle it safely.”

VisionQuest Recovery Society said in an emailed statement to iNFOnews they were notified of the assault on the family.

"We were very concerned to hear such an event had occurred in our community by one of our former residents," said executive director Megan Worley in the email. "We have offered our support to the family and thank the RCMP for attending as quickly as they could.

"While this incident is very serious, it is also isolated. VisionQuest Recovery Society has a zero tolerance policy for violence and any individual who threatens or commits a violent act while in our facilities or community will not be permitted to remain in or re-enter our Society."

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