Man wanted for river trail assault arrested after public plea

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This article was published 27/08/2021 (1471 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Police took into custody the man suspected of sexually assaulting a teenage girl on the Red River trail near Churchill High School hours after asking for the public’s help to find him.

Jordan Andrew Bruyere, 29 of Winnipeg, has been charged with sexual assault, invitation to sexual touching and sexual interference — a charge laid when the victim is under age 16.

The police service released surveillance video of the suspect on Tuesday, and received a flood of responses from the public, Const. Rob Carver told reporters Friday.

Police said earlier this month that the girl was walking on the river trail around 3:45 a.m. on Aug. 8, when a man grabbed her and seriously sexually assaulted her. The teen was able to free herself and ran for help.

Later that day, a woman in her 20s was jogging on the trail near Harkness Avenue at around 6 p.m., when a man came up from the riverbank and assaulted her. The woman screamed for help and escaped.

Investigators have probed five sex attacks in the area this year, Carver told the Free Press.

There have been other assaults and attempted robberies on the trail this year. At this point, it remains unclear whether those incidents are connected to the sex assaults.

Police said differences in the details of the attacks were such that investigators didn’t initially look for a single suspect.

Carver was asked whether Bruyere is a suspect in the other sex assaults.

“At the moment, we’ve only laid charges regarding the incident at Churchill High School. We are certainly looking at the fact that he would fit profiles and likely, possibly be linked to the other river trail assaults. We do not have enough evidence at this point to lay those charges,” he said. “We had previously released that we were investigating a series of assaults… I can say that with help from the public we’ve been able to make some… headway.”

Police have not received other reports of sex crimes on the trail since their public announcement in early August.

In 2017, Bruyere was sentenced to just under two years in jail after pleading guilty to robbing a Cavalier Drive convenience store while he was armed with an imitation handgun.

Court heard Bruyere, who is Indigenous, had a “chaotic” and nomadic upbringing marked by struggles with alcohol and drug addictions. Bruyere owed a drug debt to a street gang and robbed the store in an act of desperation, his lawyer told court.

— with files from Dean Pritchard

erik.pindera@freepress.mb.ca