‘Killing machine’ bound to maximum security

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This article was published 01/06/2017 (2765 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

He’ll spend the rest of his life behind bars for murdering three homeless men in downtown Winnipeg, but John Paul Ostamas appeared in court this week to deal with old criminal charges against him as he prepares for a possible transfer to a maximum-security prison.

Ostamas, 41, pleaded guilty Thursday to charges that date back to August 2014 in Thunder Bay, Ont., where he was living before he came to Winnipeg. The charges — mischief, uttering threats and failing to attend court — show that Ostamas, who has been diagnosed as having schizophrenia, was abusing alcohol and couldn’t control his anger before he killed three other transient men in April 2015.

He admitted this week to flying into a rage, smashing glass and damaging a parked rental car after a friend asked him to leave her residence. Hours later, intoxicated, he tried to get into a closed McDonald’s restaurant and threatened to kill an employee who was taking out the garbage. The incidents were just a small part of Ostamas’s 14-year criminal record — a record he tied up Thursday by pleading guilty to the outstanding charges and accepting a four-month sentence. That penalty was the court’s way of dotting its I’s and crossing its T’s, as Ostamas is serving three consecutive life sentences with no chance of parole for 75 years.

With no outstanding charges against Ostamas, who is from Fort Hope First Nation in northwestern Ontario and was homeless himself, federal corrections officials may now choose to transfer him from Manitoba’s Stony Mountain Institution to a federal prison, likely to a maximum-security facility.

He pleaded guilty last year to three counts of second-degree murder for the beating deaths of Myles Monias, 37, Donald Collins, 65, and Stony Bushie, 48. The deaths happened within a span of two weeks starting on April 10, 2015. The attacks prompted the Winnipeg Police Service to issue warnings for the safety of transient people in the city.

After Ostamas admitted to the killings, the Crown prosecutor told court Ostamas had not shown any signs of rehabilitation and had described himself as a “killing machine.”

Court heard that while incarcerated, Ostamas shared a letter with a spiritual counsellor that he’d written to his lawyer. It says he killed the men because his pregnant girlfriend had been raped by four men and he planned to track them down and kill them. No evidence was presented that the woman existed.

There was no application to have him declared not criminally responsible for the killings.

katie.may@freepress.mb.ca