MARCQ-EN-BAROEUL, FRANCE – A Cornwall native who now makes her home in France said Friday the terrorist attacks in the French capital have left everyone shaken.
Stacey Kenney said in an interview from her home in Marcq-en-Barœul, France the attacks that left 12 dead at a Paris satirical newspaper and resulted in a pair of hostage situations that had the world transfixed have left her family and friends searching for answers.
“We were scared, of course,” she said. “A lot of our friends are ex-pats and everyone is (experiencing) a high level of concern.
“There’s a lot of sorrow and sadness.”
Kenney’s home is two hours from Paris, the centre of the attacks, but the entire country was forced to implement protocols associated with the highest terror-threat level France can implement.
“We received e-mails from the school,” said Kenney, who was born in Cornwall and grew up here before settling in Ottawa.
Kenney and her husband Greg have two young boys who attend school in the area around their new home.
“In France they don’t have school buses – you drive your kids to school if they don’t walk,” she said. “In the carpool area where you drop your kids off it was gated. They just wanted you to drop your kids off and that’s it – no socializing.”
Greg, who works for the Department of Veterans Affairs and is in charge of 14 Canadian First World War memorial sites throughout Europe, said the country has remained resolute in the face of the attacks – despite the day-to-day changes that have been implemented.
“Here it is more of a defiant attitude,” he said. “‘Je suis Charlie’ is everywhere. They even have it (labelled) in the top corner of some TV channels.
“It just seems to have heightened everyone’s resolve.”
A candlelight vigil in the community where the couple lives gathered more than 5,000 people this week.
The couple had made their home in Ottawa before making the move to France in August.
Ottawa was the centre of a terror attack this fall when a soldier was killed at the Canadian War Memorial.
“You don’t expect this anywhere,” Stacey said of the attacks. “Nowhere is safe. It happens all over the world.”
Friday marked the end of the Paris siege, when with explosions and gunfire, French security forces killed the two al Qaeda-linked brothers who staged a murderous rampage at a satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo as well as an associate who seized a kosher supermarket to try to help them escape.
At least seven people were killed Friday – the three terrorists and at least four hostages – after 12 people were brutally executed in the newspaper attack Wednesday.
Sixteen hostages were freed Friday, one from the printing plant where the two brothers staged themselves and 15 others from a Paris grocery store.
