Soccer facility closed after purposely set fire destroys $25,000 covered bench, damages turf

Police are searching for suspects after a group of people torched a players bench at the Bonivital Soccer Club in the early morning hours Thursday.

“It’s pretty disheartening,” Steven Gzebb, the club’s executive director, said by phone Friday.

“Certainly, a moment of disbelief that someone would go to that extent and do something like that.”

Winnipeg Police Service Const. Claude Chancy confirmed the incident is being investigated as arson. As of Friday afternoon, no arrests had been made, he said.

Gzebb said he learned of fire at the club, located on Sunset Boulevard, after a groundskeeper arrived to tend to the soccer fields a few hours after it was sparked.

He reviewed footage from the club’s surveillance camera, which showed a group of what looked like five teenagers arriving at the outdoor fields around 3:40 a.m. The group hung around for about 20 minutes, before they started lighting small fires inside the covered structure, he said.

“They started a little fire and then were just going around the facility, grabbing anything they could to throw on top of it to make it bigger,” Gzebb said. “Then, what really sent it over the top was they grabbed a garbage bag full of garbage out of our bin… and then that was it.”

The group fled around 4:11 a.m. Additional footage from the scene, viewed by the Free Press, shows several people walking through a nearby parking lot, while seemingly glancing over their shoulders at the blaze.

Fire crews arrived shortly after, Gzebb said.

The bench, installed about 18 months ago with the help of a provincial government grant, was completely destroyed. It will cost roughly $25,000 to replace, and is now the subject of an ongoing insurance claim, Gzebb said.

A 15-by-15 foot section of turf was also damaged, forcing the club to temporarily cancel soccer games, he said.

Gzebb said there are about seven weeks left in the soccer season, and it will be unlikely the club will be able to replace the bench before it ends.

The club asked anybody with information about the incident to contact them at admin@bonivitalsoccer.com, or to call police.

“We feel, with the video footage we have, somebody has got to recognize one of these five people,” Gzebb said. “For us, at this point… we wanted them to be held responsible and hold some accountability with this.”

Gzebb said the people who started the blaze for the fire may not understand the significance of the damage, and the impact it has on the community.

“Dollars aside, it’s the kids who are affected,” he said.

tyler.searle@freepress.mb.ca