EDMONTON — Xavier Rejano made his dad a birdhouse for Father's Day.
The gift was one of the boy's first thoughts when the police came to tell his family that Eddie Rejano, 39, was one of three armoured-car guards shot dead during a failed robbery at HUB Mall on the University of Alberta campus early Friday.
Rejano's wife, Cleo Badon, said she was getting Xavier, 7, ready for school Friday morning when she heard about the shooting by phone. She told her sons, “Daddy was in an accident and we don’t know what happened yet.”
When police arrived to notify them in person of Rejano’s death, Xavier thought of a special event just three days away.
“He said, ‘It’s Father’s Day. I made him a bird house,” Badon said.
Badon said Rejano had been happy to start his job as an armed security officer with G4S Cash Solutions Canada because he aspired to a career in law enforcement. Rejano, who moved to Alberta from Ontario in 2007, ultimately wanted to join the Edmonton Police Service, she said.
The couple also have a younger son Xylar, who is 4.
Badon’s parents have been with her at the family’s home since they learned of the shooting, along with Rejano’s brother from Grande Prairie. The rest of the family is on its way to Alberta from Ontario and British Columbia, she said.
Rejano was gunned down Friday morning along with three fellow security guards while they were making a delivery to a banking machine at the University of Alberta. Michelle Shegelski and Brian Ilesic also died. Matthew Schuman is in critical condition in University Hospital.
Shegelski, 26, was remembered by family and friends as a loving woman with an impish smile and a soft spot for her dogs. She lived in Edmonton with her husband, Victor, a former soldier who completed two tours of Afghanistan with the Canadian Forces. The couple married in April.
“They were so happy together,” Michelle Shegelski’s shattered mother-in-law, Henrietta, said before she and her husband, Roy, left Lac du Bonnet, Man., to join their grieving son. “My son had found a soulmate.
“He had been to Afghanistan and had got through without a scratch. It’s just ... devastating.”
A cadet in her youth, when she dreamed of joining the military, Shegelski grew up in High Level, where her father, Peter Ernst, is the mayor. Health issues prevented her from joining the army, but she loved her work with G4S.
Rejano was also a guitar player who worked part-time at a local shooting range, a friend said.
“I will always remember him for his sense of humour, devotion to his wife and two boys, and how easy he was to talk to,” said Jacob Smith, who had known Rejano for two years.
The two worked together part-time at the Wild West Shooting Centre in West Edmonton Mall.
“When I first started working with him, we became friends quickly,” he said “(Eddie) made a lot of friends at work easily, because that’s the kind of guy he was.”
Smith said the two had attended an introductory meeting for the Spruce Grove Gun Club a few weeks ago.
“He loved shooting,” Smith said of his friend who was 39.
“He was quite invested in the sport, getting into competitive pistol shooting. He is a very funny guy, we shared a lot of laughs.”
The two had recently started hanging out together outside of work. Rejano was a guitar player. They had bonded over rock and heavy metal music.
Smith said he had just exchanged texts with Rejano before the start of his shift Thursday, and spent most Friday concerned until news broke that his friend had been killed.
“I will miss being around him. I will always remember him for his sense of humour, devotion to his wife and two boys, and how easy he was to talk to.
Those close to 35-year-old Ilesic gathered at a St. Albert home to remember a man they said in an email “left them far too soon.”
The father to a 12-year old daughter, Ilesic was a joy to be around and deeply loved by all his family and friends, his family said.
“We are deeply saddened and shocked by today’s events and are trying to deal with it as best we can.”
The family described Ilesic as someone with “many hopes and dreams” and “due to today’s tragedy his hopes and dreams are no longer possible.
“Our hearts go out to the other families that have also been affected.”
Schuman, a military firefighter, has been a full-time Air Force member since 2009, military spokeswoman Maj. Lena Angell said.
Lt.-Col. John Reiffenstein, base commander of CFB Edmonton, issued a statement, expressing his sympathies to Schuman’s family. “Our focus right now is on providing support to the family of Corp. Schuman who is by his side at the University of Alberta Hospital as he undergoes treatment,” Reiffenstein said.
“Our thoughts and prayers are also with the families of the other three victims who did not survive the vicious attack.”
Shegelski, who would have celebrated her 27th birthday next month, was “a very sweet, gregarious, loving person,” Henrietta Shegelski said. “I can still see her, with this little grin.”
Smitten with her relationship with Victor, Shegelski tweeted about it good-naturedly under her maiden name, and in a personal blog, www.angrytruth.blogspot.ca. She mused about many topics, ranging from feminism to her wedding plans.
“As an ice breaker, with most new vendors I would typically tell them how lucky I was to be marrying a man who had not only opinions on colours and details, but also was actively involved in selecting them,” she wrote on March 3.
Jared Olson, a friend Shegelski met while both were studying at Grant MacEwan University, said she always talked about getting married and was interested in women’s rights.
She had been a security guard for several years and on occasion got to drive an armoured car, Olson said.
“It was a job she loved,” he said.
A former guard for G4S, who asked to be identified only as Tyler, said he trained Shegelski, and that she was a solid, competent guard.
“She was fantastic — always out there training the new guys, just there to help,” he said. “She knew exactly what she was doing.”
Shegelski had worked for the firm for about four years. She began training other officers a year after she had completed training herself. He said he was told by former colleagues that she had been on a training run with two trainees on Thursday night when the shootings occurred.
All trainers and trainees would have been armed and wearing bullet-resistant vests.
“You’re not allowed out of the truck unless you’re armed,” he said.
At the time he worked there, G4S only serviced two machines at the HUB Mall at the University of Alberta, the site of the shootings.
“It’s your standard night stop where you’re going in to put cash into the ABMs,” he said. “That stop, especially on Thursdays, you’re talking maybe $2,000 to $5,000. It’s senseless.”
While guards are armed, they are instructed to keep their weapons in their holsters unless their lives are threatened, he said.
“I’m still a little bit in shock because that could have been me,” the 29-year-old father of two said.
