Judge sends man to prison, has message to public for ‘beyond the pale’ bus stop attack Part of victim’s ear bitten off in gruesome, unprovoked June assault that ‘cannot be tolerated in a civilized society’ By: Dean Pritchard Posted: 7:00 PM CST Tuesday, Feb. 14, 2023

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A Winnipeg man has been sentenced to four years in prison after admitting to biting off part of a man’s ear during an unprovoked attack at a West End bus stop.

Nathaniel Aaron Pittman pleaded guilty to one count of aggravated assault for the June 9 assault that left his 55-year-old victim fearing he was going to die.

“These are an exceptionally grave set of circumstances,” provincial court Judge Ray Wyant told Pittman, 26, at a sentencing hearing last month.

“What you did to that gentleman was beyond the pale and cannot be tolerated in a civilized society.”

The incident is one in a lengthy list of recent incidents targeting Winnipeg Transit passengers and drivers.

“The court is alive to the fact that there has been a great deal of publicity and public concern expressed about safety in bus shelters and on buses in the city,” Wyant said. “The court is not immune to the fact that people have expressed publicly their fear… of being randomly attacked.”

Court heard the victim had just finished work and was waiting for a bus at the corner of Notre Dame Avenue and Arlington Street at about 11 p.m. when Pittman, with no warning, punched him in the head and took him to the ground. Pittman bit into the man’s right ear, spitting a severed portion onto the roadway.

“It was so painful, I kept saying: ‘Stop, stop, why are you doing this?’” the man wrote in a victim impact statement provided to court.

Pittman punched the man in the face, breaking his denture. When the man tried to push him away, Pittman bit the fingers on both his hands.

Pittman “didn’t say anything while he was hurting me,” the victim wrote, adding he “feared for (his) life) during the attack.

A witness called police, who arrived to find Pittman uninjured, with blood on his face and hands.

The victim, who had heart surgery in 2017, did not return to work until November, and continues to suffer nightmares as a result of the attack, said Crown attorney Jeff Nichols.

Pittman was intoxicated by alcohol and had little memory of the attack, court was told.

“It was so painful, I kept saying: ‘Stop, stop, why are you doing this?’”–Victim impact statement

A pre-sentence report provided to court “suggests (Pittman) has the capacity to function properly… but there is obviously some sort of issue that happens when he’s had too much to drink,” Nichols said.

In 2016, Pittman pleaded guilty to carrying a concealed weapon and was sentenced to 18 months supervised probation.

When he was arrested in the June attack, he was on release following an arrest 10 months earlier for assaulting security staff at a Pembina Highway Holiday Inn. Pittman pleaded guilty to assault and assault causing bodily harm and was sentenced at the same January hearing dealing with the bus stop attack to time served.

According to a pre-sentence report, he had a troubled upbringing on Ebb and Flow First Nation, experienced family neglect and was often ostracized at school.

Wyant credited Pittman for the work he has done to address his alcohol addiction while in custody, but said the seriousness of the attack demanded that denunciation and deterrence take priority over rehabilitation concerns.

“This was an unprovoked attack on an individual for no reason whatsoever,” he said. “The public needs to be assured that the courts understand their safety is important.”

The Amalgamated Transit Union has repeatedly sounded alarms about rising violence.

On June 3, a Winnipeg Transit bus waiting at the Graham Avenue corridor was filled with bear spray following a robbery. Police found a suspect nearby and arrested him after using a Taser.

Last month, 45-year-old Peter Radulescu pleaded guilty to attempted murder and was sentenced to 13 years in prison after he admitted to stabbing a 70-year-old woman on a bus downtown.

Also last month, police arrested a woman accused of assaulting a bus driver. a teen passenger and another woman who stepped in to fight the first unruly passenger. In a separate January incident, a father and his 10-year-old son were assaulted on a bus and a male passenger had to fend off a machete attack.

Mayor Scott Gillingham recently promised to establish a Winnipeg Transit security force within the next few months.

“The details are yet to be determined, but the bottom line is we need to ensure that transit is a safe space for everyone who rides the bus and, certainly, those who work on the bus,” Gillingham told reporters last month.

dean.pritchard@freepress.mb.ca