Police investigate North End suspicious death

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 20/04/2022 (1566 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Winnipeg police homicide detectives are investigating after firefighters found a man dead in suspicious circumstances Wednesday.

At about 6:30 a.m., Winnipeg Fire Paramedic Service members responded to a fire at 669 Flora Ave., where they discovered a body in the grey, two-storey house.

Police had not yet announced any arrests, nor released the man’s identity, age or cause of death.

Chad Murdock has lived across the street in the North End neighbourhood with his wife and baby since October.

“I looked outside and saw smoke coming out the top window — black smoke,” said Murdock, 43.

He said police had previously been in and out of the house numerous times in the short period he and his family has lived on Flora Avenue.

“That place has always been bad for drug dealers — always traffic, hookers going there… you could see gang members. Really bad,” he told the Free Press.

On Wednesday morning, the second floor windows were open, with one on the rear of the home smashed out, but there was little other visible evidence of a fire.

Police, including the forensics unit, focused their investigation in the backyard, where trash and clothing lay on melting snow. A carpet was draped over the railing of the back deck, and the doors of the house remained open.

An unmarked police vehicle sat on adjacent McKenzie Street, while a marked forensics truck was parked in the alley to the immediate rear of the house.

To the east, children played in the yard outside Immaculate Heart of Mary, a private Ukrainian Catholic nursery-to-Grade 8 school.

Murdock lives near another house, now boarded up, that used to be the problem property on the block, he said. The alleged drug-and-gang activity just moved across the street.

“Now they sell crack there… non-stop traffic,” he said, pointing to the house now behind yellow crime scene tape. “Now there’s somebody dead — which we assumed, because we saw all this and police came to our door asking us questions.”

Murdock is frustrated. He said living on Flora Avenue was fine, at first, but the house now at the centre of a police investigation across the street causes regular problems.

“We’ve got CFS visits and I don’t like this (alleged activity). They see this, this is the neighbourhood. We’re trying to get our (other) kids back and this doesn’t help, really. It’s stupid,” he said.

“There’s needles on the ground and we can’t do nothing about it. It’s non-stop.”

erik.pindera@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @erik_pindera