75 years for ‘killing machine’

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This article was published 26/06/2016 (3007 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

After hearing their loved ones’ slayings described in horrifying detail, families of John Ostamas’s victims took no comfort in Monday’s court ruling that he won’t be eligible for parole for 75 years.

The killer’s apology to the families of the vulnerable homeless men he beat to death didn’t help, either.

“It doesn’t make me feel any better,” Ron Monias said after the Court of Queen’s Bench hearing in which Justice Vic Toews accepted a joint recommendation by the Crown and the defence to prohibit Ostamas from being eligible for parole for 75 years — 25 years for each of the three men he killed. He pleaded guilty to three counts of second-degree murder in May.

“I can’t get my son back and accepting (Ostamas’) remorse isn’t very high on my books,” said the father who travelled from Garden Hill First Nation for the hearing.

In April 2015, Ostamas attacked Myles Monias, 37, in a downtown bus shelter. Two weeks later, Donald Collins, 65, was killed in a back alley. Within a few hours, 48-year-old Stony Bushie was killed in a parkade. The slayings prompted police to issue warnings about the safety of street people.

Bushie’s family said the crime has tested their faith. “We had a good grandma who was a Christian who brought us up well and that we’ve got to forgive,” said Stony Bushie’s nephew, Franklin Bushie. “But what he did was so horrible I don’t know if my family has the will to forgive.”

He was one of several family members who came to Winnipeg from Little Grand Rapids to attend the hearing.

Relatives of Collins live out of province and did not attend the hearing.

Crown attorney Sheila Leinburd told the judge why she and defence lawyer Greg Brodsky jointly recommended Ostamas not be eligible for parole for 75 years.

“This is based on a number of facts,” she said. “At the forefront is the protection of society.”

Ostamas has shown he is “particularly sadistic, particularly violent and merciless,” Leinburd said. “This man is extremely dangerous and an ongoing threat to society.”

Leinburd described the “monstrous” slayings in graphic detail — including descriptions of video surveillance that captured two of the killings, the autopsy reports and the vulnerability of the victims who each had high blood-alcohol levels when they were slain.

“They had no place to run, no place to hide,” Leinburd said.

She read impact statements from the families of Monias and Bushie. Both were described as gentle, loving men with strong family ties. Both had their own personal struggles.

Monias was seated on a bench in the bus shelter early April 10, 2015, when he was attacked by Ostamas, who stomped on his head and face and snapped his neck. He disposed of the victim’s bloodied clothes by tossing them off the Queen Elizabeth Way bridge into the Red River. Monias’s body was discovered at about 6 a.m. when the morning commute began, Leinburd said.

Bushie’s slaying on April 24, 2015, was captured by surveillance cameras near a downtown construction site. He was beaten with a two-by-four piece of lumber, and Ostamas stomped on his head and hit him with a steel bar until his head was crushed.

Ostamas tried to chop off Bushie’s head, court heard. Blunt force trauma killed him but he also suffered 10 stab wounds to the neck. Ostamas tried to hide Bushie’s body by covering it with a piece of plywood.

At one point during Monday’s proceedings, two of Bushie’s family members were overcome by emotion and had to leave the courtroom.

Collins was attacked two hours after Bushie. The autopsy found he died from blunt- and sharp-force wounds. He suffered 71 separate injuries at the hands of Ostamas, including stab wounds, strangulation and fractures.

‘I can’t get my son back and accepting (killer John Ostamas’) remorse isn’t very high on my books’– Ron Monias

“His head is virtually sliced wide open,” said Leinburd. There were foot impressions on his body. After the killing, Ostamas — who was wearing two sets of clothes — disposed of Collins’ clothes and his own bloody clothes in the river.

“He called himself a ‘killing machine,’” Leinburd said, referring to a 340-page statement of facts agreed to by the defence and Crown.

Leinburd said Ostamas has never shown any sign of being rehabilitated. He has convictions dating back 14 years to when he lived in Thunder Bay, Ont., including assault, assault causing bodily harm and assault with a weapon.

The 40-year-old is from the remote Fort Hope First Nation in northwestern Ontario. His sister and brother attended his hearing Monday and submitted letters that were read aloud in court by Brodsky. They said that while growing up in Fort Hope their brother was a normal kid who played hockey but things changed during his adolescence.

Their brother said he felt sick and would walk around all night. He abused substances. When he was in his early teens, he broke into a grocery store and the police took him to a cell and “smashed his face,” his brother Wesley Ostamas wrote. “Now he’s just another statistic in the court system.”

They said their brother has been diagnosed with schizophrenia and sought treatment for mental illness in psychiatric wards in Thunder Bay, Kenora and Sioux Lookout.

There was no application to have him declared not criminally responsible for the three killings to which he confessed.

While in jail, Ostamas shared a letter with a spiritual counsellor that he’d written to his lawyer. It says he killed the three men because his pregnant girlfriend had been raped by four men and he planned to track them all down and kill them. There was no evidence presented that such a girlfriend existed. Ostamas also confessed to several other killings that police couldn’t connect him with, either, court heard.

After Toews accepted the joint recommendation that Ostamas not be eligible for parole for 75 years, he asked Ostamas if he understood the ruling. Ostamas said he did and stood to address the court.

“You made me like this,” he said, showing no emotion and apparently referring to the head injury he suffered in jail when he was a teen.

“Yes I was wrong doing the crimes,” Ostamas said. “I understand and take the consequences for that. I am sorry for the victims and the community, too. It’s hard for me to say certain things. I was wrong and am willing to accept the consequences,” he said.

carol.sanders@freepress.mb.ca