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Police release description of suspect in St. Vital killing

By: Staff Writer

Posted: 06/21/2012 11:43 AM | Comments: 0 | Last Modified: 06/21/2012 12:51 PM | Updates

Kaila Tran

Police have released a description of a suspect they are seeking in connection with the death Wednesday of Kaila Latoya Tran, 26, the city's 17th homicide victim.

Police said the suspect is a man in his early 20s with short, dark hair, dark, olive-skin, a slim build, and 5’6" to 6’ tall.

Tran died after she was attacked and stabbed about 7 a.m. in a parking lot near her home in the 100 block of Clayton Drive.

"Anyone that's come across her knew how great of a person she was. She was energetic, positive," said a friend who worked with Tran for three years, via Twitter.

"She was like family," another friend told the Free Press. "She was a bubbly person, great person. She was everything you could ask for in a friend."

Tran worked for Teleco, according to the company's website.

Police received a call just after 7 a.m. about an injured person. Witnesses said neighbours heard the woman screaming, rushed to intervene and scared off the attacker.

Lois Coish, who's lived in the building opposite for 17 years, was standing outside when she heard the woman yell, "Leave me alone!" and then begin to scream.

"I thought he was hitting her. I didn't see a knife," Coish said.

Another neighbour, who lived in the same building as the woman and asked not to be identified, said he heard the woman's screams and rushed to the window. He saw the woman, who had apparently been getting into her car to go to work, on the ground with a man standing over her, stabbing her. As neighbours rushed from the building, the suspect ran off, the neighbour said.

Four or five people ran from the woman's building and others came from a building across the street. A neighbour got on a bike and chased the suspect as he ran along Clayton Drive, before deking toward the river and over an embankment. The cyclist was unable to follow.

At one point, the fleeing man dropped something and turned back to pick it up, said witness Kevin Olivier.

Winnipeg police spokesman Const. Jason Michalyshen said he wasn't aware if a weapon had been found.

Michalyshen said Wednesday that officers were trying to gather as much information at the scene as possible.

"I don't have enough details really to say, 'Yes, this was a manhunt,' " said Michalyshen. The police helicopter wasn't used in the case, he said.

As the man fled, neighbours performed first aid on Tran, who had a cut hand, a stab wound to her shoulder near her neck and damage to her teeth. The woman was struggling to breathe and unable to talk, a witness said.

Olivier said Tran lived with her boyfriend, and her boyfriend's mother lives in a building across the street.

"It's all a little startling," a witness told the Free Press.

Friends wrote on her Facebook page, calling her a "loving and giving soul" and "one of the sweetest people I have ever had the honour of knowing out of this world."

Her sister posted pictures on Facebook with the words, "The invisible ties between sisters are the strongest bonds... forever missed but never forgotten."

-- with files from Jenny Ford

gabrielle.giroday@freepress.mb.ca julie.carl@freepress.mb.ca

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Updated on Thursday, June 21, 2012 at 12:51 PM CDT: Adds background, image.

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