Squatters ‘made themselves at home’ Arrests made after West End bungalow being prepared for sale ‘trashed,’ owner’s daughter says
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Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 10/08/2025 (405 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.
When Christy Orr prepared to renovate her elderly mother’s home last month, she had no idea squatters would move into the West End bungalow, change the locks and begin living in it as though it was their own.
Orr, who lives in Niverville with her husband and children, was planning to fix up the Home Street house and list it for sale this summer. Instead, she is filing insurance claims and cleaning up the aftermath from a trio of break-ins that began in late July, she said.
Supplied Christy Orr and her husband placed exterior padlocks on the home’s door after the initial break-in, but somebody attempted to pry those locks off.
“The house is basically trashed. Everything that was boxed up and set aside to be moved or put into storage was unboxed, rifled through, taken, destroyed,” Orr said in a phone interview.
“They moved in. They made themselves at home. They were in for the long haul. This wasn’t just a break-in. They were squatting.”
Orr’s mother, who has lived in the home for decades, has been staying with her periodically in Niverville for roughly a month while work is ongoing in the home, she said.
The trouble began July 29, when Orr and her husband went to check on the place. She had last visited the house less than 24 hours before, and found nothing amiss, she said.
When the couple tried to open the front door’s deadbolt, they found the key would not fit because someone had changed the lock, she said.
Cameras previously attached to the home’s exterior had also been removed, Orr said.
Supplied The people who broke into the home rearranged furniture, rummaged through boxes and left a mess inside.
“We couldn’t really even fathom what was going on at that point,” she said. “We started walking around the property to go to the back door, and that’s when we realized somebody was in the house.”
A man and woman fled from the home into the property’s fenced backyard. The man was able to scale the fence and escape, but Orr and her husband held the woman until police arrived and arrested her, Orr said.
The couple changed the locks again and left overnight. When they returned the next morning to “assess the damage and try and start figuring out what happened,” they realized someone had broken in again, this time smashing a window in the dining room to gain entry, she said.
Nobody was inside, so the couple again phoned police and re-secured the home, Orr said.
The fix held until Aug. 3, when they returned to find multiple people inside.
Supplied Christy Orr said the people who broke into her mother’s home painted the window on the front door black, in an apparent attempt to prevent people from looking inside.
“They had boarded up the windows with items from inside the house. They painted the door window black so that nobody could see in. They filled the toilets and left them. The smell in there — it’s just bad. It wasn’t pleasant,” Orr said.
During the incidents, squatters rearranged the furniture, hung a dartboard and dream catcher, cooked eggs, used the shower and reinstalled a window air-conditioning unit that had been disconnected ahead of the renovations, Orr said.
Orr and her husband confronted the group of squatters. One of them hit her in the head with a bottle before fleeing, she said.
The couple was again able to restrain one suspect until police arrived. Officers later arrested four other people believed to be connected to the crime, she said.
Winnipeg Police Service Const. Pat Saydak confirmed officers were sent to the home and “a number of arrests were made.”
“I have no further information,” he wrote in an email.
Supplied A bathroom in the home suffered some of the worst damage.
Orr is in contact with the WPS victim services unit, which told her two women and a man have been charged in connection to the break-ins.
Both women have since been released, while the man remained in custody as of Thursday, Orr said.
The incident has shaken Orr, who said the Daniel McIntyre neighbourhood, which is a part of the West End, has taken a turn for the worse over the last decade.
“What was their game plan? They were just going to change the locks, and we were just going to go away and give up? I don’t know what their thought process was. I would love to understand,” she said.
“It’s violating — the feeling of trying to go back to the house now — it’s just disgust.”
tyler.searle@freepress.mb.ca
Tyler Searle is a multimedia producer who writes for the Free Press’s city desk. A graduate of Red River College Polytechnic’s creative communications program, he wrote for the Stonewall Teulon Tribune, Selkirk Record and Express Weekly News before joining the paper in 2022. Read more about Tyler.
Every piece of reporting Tyler produces is reviewed by an editing team before it is posted online or published in print — part of the Free Press‘s tradition, since 1872, of producing reliable independent journalism. Read more about Free Press’s history and mandate, and learn how our newsroom operates.
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History
Updated on Tuesday, September 9, 2025 12:49 PM CDT: Adds missing quotation mark
