Police alerted to separate slayings two hours apart

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This article was published 03/02/2023 (992 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The 25-year-old man accused in a slaying outside a Henry Avenue shelter has a history of armed assault while intoxicated.

A passerby flagged down a Winnipeg Police Service cruiser at around midnight Thursday as it was patrolling near Martha Street and Henry Avenue. Officers were directed to an injured man on the ground on the first 100 block of Henry, police said.

Officers found a man unresponsive outside the Salvation Army’s Centre of Hope shelter just off Main Street, and began CPR until paramedics arrived to take over.

Clifford Earl Bos, 56, was taken to hospital in critical condition but was later pronounced dead. His death marked the fifth homicide in Winnipeg this year.

Officers arrested Joseph Diamond Sanderson on the nearby 100 block of the Disraeli Freeway at about 4 a.m.

Sanderson has been charged with second-degree murder. He appeared in bail court Friday. He remains in remand, with a Feb. 17 court date.

In 2017, Sanderson was given a conditional sentence of 18 months for an assault causing bodily harm — in which he used a knife on a cousin — and 18 months of supervised probation. He breached that conditional sentence several times, court records show.

On Dec. 22, 2018, while couch surfing in the Powerview-Pine Falls area, Sanderson was “black-out” intoxicated when he got into an altercation with a man he was staying with over cleaning the house, according to court documents.

At his February 2020 sentencing for one count of assault with a weapon, court heard the victim was taken to the Pine Falls hospital with eight stab wounds, none of which were deemed life-threatening.

His defence attorney told provincial court Judge Kelly Moar that Sanderson was diagnosed with schizophrenia while in custody at Headingley Correctional Institution awaiting trial.

Sanderson told his lawyer he heard voices telling him to do violent things and people were out to get him. Court heard Sanderson had been given medication, which he said was helping him “a lot.”

Sanderson pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 12 months in jail, less time served, and given two years of supervised probation, including a condition he attend mental health treatment and take prescribed medication.

Sanderson was prohibited from owning firearms and other weapons for life.

Bos’s slaying was the second in the area in less than two hours.

Police were called Wednesday to the Yale Hotel on the 800 block of Main Street, shortly after 10 p.m. A man, who had suffered stab wounds, told officers there could be another victim in a residence on Selkirk Avenue.

The first man was transported to hospital in critical condition, later upgraded to stable.

At a duplex on Selkirk Avenue, police found the body of Lee James Boulette, 40.

Boulette was a past member of the Indian Posse street gang and was on good terms with the Bloods street gang, court heard at his 2018 sentencing for unauthorized possession of a firearm without a certificate. He was sentenced to 385 days in custody, plus unsupervised probation for 18 months and a 10-year weapons prohibition.

He was charged with several offences after police seized an illegally stored AR-15 rifle in his basement suite on Redwood Avenue on July 27, 2017.

Police have asked anyone with information on Boulette’s killing to call homicide investigators at 204-986-6508 or Crime Stoppers anonymously at 204-786-8477.

Twitter: @erik_pindera

erik.pindera@freepress.mb.ca