Man pleads guilty to townhouse fire that killed woman in 2024

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This article was published 24/07/2025 (247 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

A mentally ill Alberta man has admitted responsibility for a $5-million townhouse fire that killed a 30-year-old Winnipeg woman and displaced more than a dozen people.

Izak Catlen Eldon Sararas, 28, pleaded guilty in court Thursday to one count of manslaughter in the June 2024 death of Nirmaljeet Kaur.

Kaur was taken off life-support four days after the blaze at the two-storey, 12-unit townhouse complex on Keewatin Street.

Sentencing for Sararas was adjourned to August 11 to allow time for members of Kaur’s family who live outside of the country to provide victim impact statements.

Court heard Sararas has been diagnosed with schizophrenia and had not been taking his medication for several days when around 3:25 a.m. he set fire to a couch on a patio next to a ground-level suite.

The fire quickly spread upward, engulfing a second-storey suite where Kaur was living with her 21-year-old brother-in-law, Crown attorney Mike Himmelman told court, reading from an agreed statement of facts.

Security video from a nearby service station showed Sararas walking away from the townhouse “appear(ing) to flick a lighter a few times,” Himmelman said.

Around that same time, Kaur was calling 911, reporting she was trapped in her suite. During the call, Kaur stopped talking, suggesting she had lost consciousness, Himmelman said.

Firefighters extricated Kaur and her brother-in-law from the building and they were taken to hospital suffering from severe smoke inhalation. The man, who also suffered second-degree burns and injuries to his eyes, spent three days in hospital.

Damages to the townhouse complex were estimated at the time to be approximately $5 million.

Later that day, a police officer spotted Sararas at Health Sciences Centre, where he had been taken following an unrelated complaint he had been causing a disturbance. Sararas was taken into custody and charged with arson.

Sararas was charged with manslaughter after Kaur died.

In a subsequent police statement, Sararas said he had come to Winnipeg from Alberta a month earlier and had spent several days prior to the fire “wandering around” after going off his medication.

Sararas told police he didn’t set the fire to hurt anyone, “rather, he hoped the world would burn down, ‘because we are all losers,’” Himmelman said. Sararas told police he wanted to “give people’s head a shake.”

Sararas knew what he did was wrong and would have been aware someone could have died when he set the fire, Himmelman said.

Sararas remains in custody.

dean.pritchard@freepress.mb.ca