Police identify two brothers shot dead during botched bank robbery
Globe and Mail July 2, 2022
For eight years, Justin Henry considered himself the best friend of both Mathew and Isaac Auchterlonie. On Saturday, the 22-year-old brothers from central Vancouver Island were named as suspects in a botched robbery earlier this week at a Bank of Montreal branch in Saanich, B.C.—a Victoria bedroom community.
Neither of the suspects had a criminal record, police clarified Saturday, and neither was known to them.
The RCMP described them as twins in a news conference. But Mr. Henry and several other young men and women who spoke to The Globe and Mail said they were in fact triplets, and are survived by their sister Sabrina.
Mr. Henry said he first met the pair in Grade 4, at Bench Elementary School, in Cowichan Bay, B.C. The three shared a passion for Lego, Star Wars films and the Lord of the Rings trilogy, he said.
Mr. Henry described the Auchterlonie brothers, who he said grew up on a rural property on Shawnigan Lake, in central Vancouver Island, as “unbelievably smart.”
He could tell the two apart, but “they looked pretty well identical and used to get mistaken all the time.”
Both were “very quiet and very shy,” he said. Until high school at Frances Kelly Secondary School, in Mill Bay, B.C., when they began branching out, they were like two peas in a pod: One was rarely seen without the other. “They looked out for each other. They were a team.”
Another friend, Tanner Jacobs, described them as “super nice, super friendly, decent, normal kids.”
Mr. Henry recalled that when they were around 15, the brothers — who came from a hunting family and were legal gun owners — started going to the gym. “They did some cadet training,” and were interested in military training. He said they “always dressed up in camo,” adding they “liked blowing stuff up. That was their big interest.” He said the brothers’ Instagram pages, which have been set to private, showcase photos of them in tactical gear.
Sometime after high school, the brothers began drifting away from their friends, Mr. Henry and others recalled. Mr. Henry said he hadn’t spoken to either brother in a few years. “Something had to have happened to have made them do something like this. They were really good kids. This blows my mind.”