Report from inquest into 2018 slayings offers glimpse of gang violence inside Stony Mountain prison

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This article was published 05/12/2024 (667 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

In a planned attack, Stony Mountain prison inmate and Saskatchewan Warriors member Max Maurice Richard was stabbed with a shank, thrown over a second-floor railing inside the facility and beset upon by several men who stabbed him and stomped on his head before he died hours later.

Adam Kent Monias was beaten with a baseball bat in an exercise yard, sending him to hospital, where he later died. That beating was in apparent retaliation for an attack on another inmate at the same time in another part of the prison led by the Indian Posse, with whom Monias was friendly.

A report by senior provincial court Judge Robert Heinrichs, who oversaw a joint inquest in May into the 2018 slayings of the two Stony Mountain penitentiary inmates, was made public Thursday and provides an inside look at the gang activity that led to the men’s deaths within Manitoba’s only federal prison.

Provincial court judges have no jurisdiction over federal institutions, and Heinrichs said he had no authority to make formal recommendations for changes to prison policies and procedures that would prevent similar deaths in the future, as is typical of inquests.

He instead wrote of his observations and findings, including making note of the probes into the killings conducted by the federal corrections service’s Board of Investigation.

Two men, Victor Travis Ross and Wilfred George Cook, were sentenced to life for second-degree murder and a third, Michael Frank Okemow, to life for manslaughter in 2019 for their roles in Richard’s killing. Okemow and Cook were affiliated with Indian Posse, while Ross was affiliated with the Gangster Crips.

The attack was caught on prison cameras.

Richard was placed into maximum security at Stony in January 2017. At the time, he was not thought to be part of any “security threat group” — corrections parlance for a gang — but that changed when some Saskatchewan Warriors were transferred to the Manitoba prison, beginning in fall 2017.

Richard was recruited to the gang, the corrections Board of Investigations later found, though internal prison intelligence officers were unaware. The new gang began enforcing a tax on other inmates on the range, upsetting other gangs in maximum security.

Meantime, the board found a former Stony inmate and member of the Saskatchewan gang owed a debt to the Indian Posse, but wouldn’t pay before he was transferred elsewhere.

Indian Posse allocated the debt to the other members of the Saskatchewan gang — but they refused to pay it, setting into motion a planned and co-ordinated attack on Richard and two other Saskatchewan Warriors sanctioned by all the gangs on two prison ranges.

“The attacks on (the other two members) and Max Richard all started within 15 seconds of each other and lasted less that 90 seconds,” wrote Heinrichs.

The attacks, which involved inmates from two different ranges, occurred as the prisoners were returning from shared exercise time.

Ross followed Richard from a cell at 8:55 p.m. on Jan. 7, 2018 and stabbed him before pushing him through a door into a common area.

Ross then threw Richard from the railing, and he, Cook and Okemow joined in on the attack on the floor below, as officers tried to use pepper spray to stop it. It wasn’t until officers loaded a gun and ordered everyone to the floor that the beating finished and Richard received medical care.

Richard, 42, who was serving a life sentence for the 2011 stomping death of a Winnipeg woman who refused to have sex with him, died at Health Sciences Centre shortly after corrections officers quelled the brawl.

Heinrichs noted the Board of Investigation found the response by officers was appropriate in the circumstances, and that officials had no sense that violence was set to occur.

One inmate, Braiden Moneyas, was convicted in 2020 of manslaughter in Monias’s August 2018 death, while the other three charged in the killing pleaded to assault the year prior.

Monias, 25, was serving a life sentence for the 2012 second-degree murder of a cousin. Housed in medium security, Monias was not a member of, or affiliated with, any gang, but was considered friendly with the Indian Posse.

A group of Indian Posse members set upon a member of the B-side gang just before 8 p.m. on Aug. 16, 2018, after he left the exercise yard, stabbing, kicking and punching him. The fight grew larger and the corrections officers at the gate between the yard and the buildings began using pepper spray, then locked the barrier so that none of the inmates in the yard could join in, but they continued to watch.

No Indian Posse members were left in the yard, but Monias was considered an acceptable alternative as he stood on the basketball court.

Moneyas, a member of the Manitoba Warriors gang, and others approached him at about 8:06 p.m., and as Monias ran, an officer on a tower overseeing the yard demanded they lay down.

Instead, the group attacked Monias; Moneyas struck him repeatedly in the head with a baseball bat, ultimately killing him when he was taken off life support two days later. The beating stopped only when an officer loaded her rifle and pointed it at the inmates.

A search by RCMP and facility security of the yard and adjacent area where the B-side member was attacked found about 40 prison shanks, a bludgeon and the baseball bat.

In June 2019, as Court of King’s Bench Justice Chris Martin sentenced the three guilty men in Richard’s killing, he suggested that death and a spate of other slayings in Stony Mountain at the time required a public or coroner’s inquiry to “get at the root of it.”

No such inquiry has been called.

erik.pindera@freepress.mb.ca