19 year old dead, suspect in custody after attack near Lac du Bonnet

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This article was published 02/10/2017 (2544 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

LAC DU BONNET — A woman is dead after she was reportedly stabbed in the neck Tuesday morning on the edge of this small eastern Manitoba town.

RCMP confirmed a 19-year-old woman had died and a suspect, a 20-year-old man, was in custody after police responded to the scene — a car stopped on Provincial Road 502 — just after 7 a.m.

Several area residents said they believed the victim is 19-year-old Brittany Bung of Pointe du Bois, located some 40 kilometres east of Lac du Bonnet. The suspect had moved to Lac du Bonnet a couple of months ago, residents said.

A family member who answered the phone at Bung’s residence Tuesday said nobody wanted to comment at this time.

Whitney Vondracek, and her partner, Troy Bishop, said they both know Bung and recognized her car at the crime scene. They live within the area of Provincial Road 502 cordoned off for the day by police.

“I am completely shocked,” Vondracek said, noting she had worked with Bung for eight months at the local Subway before the woman got a new job at Drifters Inn, a restaurant and hotel at the edge of town. “She was extremely outgoing. She would always say she loved food.”

Vondracek said Bung recently graduated from a food program at a local adult education centre. “She wanted to do something with food. She put in an application to cook food at a retirement home.”

She said the last time she heard from Bung was about a month ago, when they texted each other about a work-related matter.

Bishop said he might have stumbled upon the incident in progress if he had followed his regular routine of drinking his coffee after his regular morning walk instead of before.

“I feel maybe I could have intervened,” he said, his voice trailing off as he stood at the end of his driveway and looked at the crime scene several metres away. “Maybe I could have taken the guy down or get the paramedics there to save her.”

Bishop said as he took his walk, he could see a car parked beside the ditch with the passenger door open, a jacket on the ground, and somebody slumped outside.

“Then the police came. A woman officer asked me to take my hands out of my jacket and asked what I was doing there. I knew it hadn’t happened that long before.”

In view of the crime scene, but on the other side of nearby Highway 11, a patron at the Drifters Inn said she heard Bung was scheduled to work at the restaurant that day but never showed up.

The owner of the restaurant said she would not comment before receiving confirmation of who the victim was.

Holly Szmerski, whose house is across the street from where RCMP officers were collecting evidence from in and around the car, was in tears and her hands were still shaking over what happened hours before just a few steps away.

“There was blood all over the highway,” she said. “If I’d been there earlier, I would have just walked up and grabbed the knife. Who cares if my hand would have been cut?

“I could have saved a life. She was only 19.”

According to a witness, the victim encountered the suspect at about 6:30 a.m. inside a local Petro-Canada convenience store. 

The barefoot and shirtless man had raced inside moments earlier. “You could tell he was on something,” the witness said. “He was just wandering around the store.”

A young woman entered, bought coffee and left, and the suspect followed, the witness said. “He jumped in her car and pulled the seat right down and said, ‘Let’s get the eff out of here.'”

Gary Nadolsky, who lives nearby on Edward Crescent, encountered a man in his yard at about 6:45 a.m., when he was about to drive his son to catch the school bus.

Nadolsky said he saw a man “come out of the shadows,” wearing nothing but pants. “This guy was in my yard. I thought he came from the (Winnipeg River) because he was soaking wet and wearing no shirt and it was pretty cold out. We kind of backed off and I told my son to come in the house.”

The man then ran along Edward Crescent in the ditch towards Provincial Road 502 where a car was parked, he said. “He looked very dishevelled and out of it.”

Nadolsky and his son got in their car and as they drove by the parked vehicle, Nadolsky saw the passenger door was open and the man was outside trying to make a call on a cellphone. A young woman was slumped on the ground outside the passenger door, he said.

“She had apparent wounds to her face and neck” and there was blood everywhere, Nadolsky said.

The suspect reportedly fled the scene when an ambulance arrived and was arrested by RCMP shortly after in nearby Halliday Park.

RCMP had the scene — Provincial Road 502 east of the town near what local residents refer to as “the skinny bridge” spanning the Winnipeg River — barricaded in both directions most of the day.

Kathy Trask, whose house is just a few metres away from the scene, said a woman “was stabbed in the neck and she died.”

Another area resident said he saw police officers holding a man on the ground outside the local heritage museum in Halliday Park near the barricaded highway section, at about 7:30 a.m.

The suspect was not, as was being reported by some residents, shot by police, the head of the Independent Investigation Unit of Manitoba said.

“We have not received any notification of any police involved incident in Lac du Bonnet of any kind at all,” the police watchdo’s civilian director, Zane Tessler, said.

bill.redekop@freepress.mb.ca

kevin.rollason@freepress.mb.ca