VANCOUVER – A man who shot and seriously wounded a former employer before confronting police in two separate Vancouver shootouts has pleaded guilty to three counts of attempted murder and two firearms charges.

Gerald Battersby appeared in B.C. Supreme Court on Thursday in connection to the 2014 shootings in the city’s Yaletown area and outside Science World.

Battersby was facing six counts of attempted murder and four firearms offences and had earlier pleaded not guilty.

Police have said a man who’d been shot was left fighting for his life outside a coffee shop where two plain-clothes officers exchanged gunfire with a suspect, who escaped on a bike along the city’s seawall.

One of the officers commandeered a bike and followed and another shootout erupted outside Science World, with dozens of officers surrounding the man, who was hospitalized for serious gunshot wounds.

Police credited several Good Samaritans and a retired doctor who’d worked as an emergency room physician for helping the man shot outside the coffee shop. (News1130; The Canadian Press)

Note to readers: This is a corrected story. An earlier version said Battersby had pleaded guilty to five counts of attempted murder in provincial court.