Man pleads guilty to unprovoked baseball bat attack on Ukrainian newcomers

A Winnipeg man has admitted to beating a teenage boy and his mother — both newly arrived refugees from Ukraine — with a baseball bat as they walked home.

Donovan Kipling, 27, pleaded guilty Monday to two counts of aggravated assault in the unprovoked Aug. 3, 2024, attack.

Kipling remains in custody. He will be sentenced at a later date following the completion of a court-ordered pre-sentence report.

Viktoriia Sokolova, the teen victim’s mother, attended the hearing along with several supporters and a Ukrainian interpreter.

Court heard Sokolova and her son, who was 14 at the time, were walking along Kent Street in Elmwood early in the evening when Kipling, wearing a Rick and Morty Halloween costume, struck both victims on the head with a baseball bat.

The boy required surgery to stop a brain bleed, while Sokolova suffered a fractured jaw and skull, Crown attorney David Gilleta told court.

“They are strangers to each other,” Gilleta said of Kipling and the victims.

Police arrested Kipling a short time later, still in possession of the Halloween costume, Gilleta said.

A charge of robbery involving alleged co-accused Dawson Marcus Keeper, 28, was stayed.

Sokolova and her son each received counselling to deal with post-traumatic stress and they both have ongoing physical ailments as a result of the attack, she told the Free Press via an interpreter.

Sokolova experiences headaches, dizziness and has lost hearing in her left ear, and her son suffers from daily headaches, occasional dizziness and weekly bloody noses.

“We feel calm because (Kipling has) been arrested and we don’t worry about it because (he) can’t do anything bad to us and to other people,” Sokolova said.

Sokolova and her son were among several Ukrainians victimized by random violence in Winnipeg after fleeing their war-torn home country.

On Dec. 20, 2023, 46-year-old Ivan Rubanik was stabbed to death while walking to work in the morning near Watt Street and Talbot Avenue in what a police spokesman described as a wrong-place-wrong-time scenario.

Ethan Gladu, 19 at the time of the attack, is charged with second-degree murder. Gladu remains in custody and is set to stand trial early next year.

On Canada Day 2022, two Ukrainian refugees were attacked while walking near the Canadian Museum for Human Rights shortly before 10:30 p.m., after they accidentally bumped into a group of males they didn’t know.

A then-22-year-old victim suffered a life-threatening stab wound but later recovered. A then-23-year-old victim was treated for exposure to bear spray.

Jayden Kyle Martin, 23, and Tyson Bechard, 22, each pleaded guilty to aggravated assault and were sentenced last year to four years in prison. A third youth accused was sentenced to three years custody and conditional supervision in the community.

— with files from Aaron Epp