Women brutalized on the same day address attacker, detail devastation in court

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This article was published 24/10/2016 (2733 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Crown prosecutors are seeking a life sentence for a Winnipeg man who brutally attacked and repeatedly sexually assaulted two women, leaving one for dead in the freezing Assiniboine River.

Justin Hudson, now 22, has pleaded guilty to two counts of aggravated sexual assault against the two victims, who were 16 and 23 when they were attacked hours apart on Nov. 8, 2014.

Hudson was initially charged with attempted murder in the high-profile case, but that charge was stayed in exchange for his guilty pleas to the other charges.

“He gets angry,” Crown attorney Debbie Buors said Tuesday, arguing for the maximum life sentence in front of provincial court Judge Timothy Killeen Tuesday. “And, unfortunately, the members of the public are his targets.”

Hudson has been assessed as showing signs of anti-social personality disorder and psychopathic traits, and treating him would be “quite challenging,” Buors said.

“This isn’t an easy fix no matter how sympathetic we might be to Mr. Hudson because of his troubled background,” she said.

Hudson and a 17-year-old boy, who has also pleaded guilty in this case, didn’t know the women they assaulted. They went out to celebrate the 17-year-old’s birthday with a plan to break into cars. Then, in separate attacks within hours of each other, they walked up behind their victims on dark city streets and raped and robbed them.

Near the Midtown Bridge around 12:30 a.m., they caught up with a 16-year-old girl who had gotten separated from her friends. They lured her under the bridge and started punching her. She fought back and tried to protect herself, but they knocked her unconscious, sexually assaulted her and stole her running shoes and jacket before leaving her in the frigid river. Somehow, she managed to travel 100 metres in the river and climb up an embankment. But when she got up, the two accused hit her with a hammer and left her on the river walk path, where she was found unconscious and hypothermic by a passerby just before 7 a.m.

In the meantime, while walking in a back lane behind the Sherbrook Pool, a 23-year-old woman realized Hudson was following her, and when she turned around to look, he hit her across the face with a baseball bat. He continued to beat her and ordered her to take off her clothes. Both boys sexually assaulted her while she was “pouring blood from her face, the inside of her mouth, and from the head wound to the back of her head,” court heard.

The victim eventually sought help at a 7-Eleven, where she explained the attack to customers – who happened to be relatives of Hudson’s. They offered to walk with her to get help, but she was gone by the time they finished paying at the till. Hudson was arrested a few days later after his family confronted him and then called police.

A 17-year-old boy, who can’t be identified under the Youth Criminal Justice Act, is also awaiting sentencing. The Crown is seeking to have him sentenced as an adult. After the attacks, he used the victim’s stolen iPod to take a photo of himself wearing her shoes and jacket – a photo that was automatically saved in her iCloud account for her to later discover.

The victims can’t be named under a publication ban. But in victim-impact statements filed in court Tuesday, both recounted the lasting effects of the violence they suffered.

“I am addressing the men who are responsible for hurting me,” the 16-year-old victim, now 18, wrote in her statement. “I am speaking to you now so that you will hear how your actions created an enormous amount of suffering for me. I will not allow you to have my silence. This is my voice. I am a real person. A human being. And you hurt me terribly, an injustice for which you are now paying the consequence.”

The teen, who wasn’t present in court Tuesday during Hudson’s sentencing, wrote she remembers only parts of that night on the riverbank: “Dark. Cold. Pain.”

“I wish I could forget those memories. But I never will,” she wrote. “After beating me with weapons, you left my body, naked and nearly dead. You stole my jacket and shoes and took my iPod. And then you posted a picture on Facebook of yourself wearing my clothes. When I saw that later, I was sickened that you felt so little remorse and instead bragged about what you had just done.”

Court heard the teen underwent multiple surgeries as a result of the severe injuries she suffered in the attack. She has scars “on most of my limbs” that remind her of that night, she wrote.

“I hope you will think about what you have done with regret in your heart. And regret not because you’ve lost your freedom, but because it was wrong to hurt me.”

The second victim, 23 at the time of the attack, said outside court she was traumatized by what happened to her but is trying to move on – with no expectation that the men who did this to her will express remorse.

“I don’t really expect anything from them. I recognize that what they’re going through now and what they’re going to go through over the whole course of their life from now on – they’ve completely changed their lives. They’ve put labels on themselves, and there’s consequences because of it, and I think that that is enough for me.”

“It’s been two years since the night I was sexually assaulted, and at times it feels like yesterday. At the time it was happening, I was so scared. I did my best to act as they wanted me to out of fear that they would hurt me even more. This made me so disgusted with myself and I hated my body for such a long time after,” she wrote in a statement filed in court.

Court heard she suffers anxiety when she’s out in public and around strangers; she’s always checking to see if anyone’s following her.

“There are things that happened to me that night that I am still ashamed about.”

Hudson’s sentencing hearing is set to resume with arguments from the defence in December. At the time of the attacks, which garnered national attention, he was facing criminal charges — of possessing a dangerous weapon and goods obtained by crime — that still need to be dealt with.

katie.may@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @thatkatiemay