Police investigate Winnipeg’s first homicide of 2019

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 02/01/2019 (2816 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Neighbours of the man whose Nairn Avenue home has been the scene of a homicide investigation since early New Year’s Day describe him as a good guy who’s had some trouble.

On Wednesday, police wouldn’t identify the deceased in Winnipeg’s first homicide of 2019, saying only that the victim was a man who had been shot and killed. 

“How unfortunate it is that we barely make it a few hours into the start of the new year before we have a homicide,” he said Wednesday.

“It’s 6 o’clock in the morning on a frigid day and someone’s been shot and killed. A family is traumatized. We have somebody dead. And we have officers fighting through everything else that’s going on to make sure that scene is secure and it’s investigated properly,” Carver said at the press conference to sum up what a busy festive season it was for police.

Neighbours of the home on the 400 block of Nairn Avenue are hoping the man they know as “Shane” isn’t the victim.

“He’s a sweet, sweet man,” said one woman who has known Shane since he moved in 18 years ago.

“He’s had a rough life,” she said, describing him as Caucasian and in his 40s.

The woman, a widowed senior who would only give her first name, “Nina,” said no one heard a commotion at the ramshackle storey-and-a-half home until police cruisers arrived Tuesday morning. In the light of day, blood could be seen in front of the house.

“I didn’t hear a thing,” she said. Neither did her granddaughter who was visiting and stayed up past midnight on New Year’s Eve, she said.

The woman said her neighbour lived alone, but has an estranged wife and four children. There is still a weather-beaten play structure in the yard. “The kids moved out on their own,” she said.

She said she last saw him just before Christmas. “He cleared off our walk,” said the woman whose husband died last January.

Shane often shovelled their sidewalk and cleared their steps of snow, she said. He had been involved with police before, but he was kind to his neighbours, said Nina and another senior who lives close by and didn’t want to be identified.

“I hope Shane isn’t in trouble again,” she said. “My husband used to tell him to stay out of trouble and Shane would say, ‘I’ll try.’ My husband would say, ‘Don’t try! Just stay out of trouble.'”

On Wednesday afternoon, police cruisers were still parked in front of the Nairn Avenue home.

carol.sanders@freepress.mb.ca