Charges dropped in June fatal stabbing of pre-teen

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This article was published 21/09/2021 (946 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Prosecutors have stayed a manslaughter charge against a woman accused of fatally stabbing a 12-year-old boy in June.

Court records show the Crown formally stayed the charge against Shania Pirrie, 19, in provincial court Wednesday morning.

Sanchez Everette Boulanger died after being stabbed on June 18 in what witnesses at the time described as a chaotic melee between two groups on Burrows Avenue, near Main Street, in Winnipeg.

Pirrie was released from custody shortly after her arrest, days after the killing. Her first court date was Wednesday, the same day the Crown stayed the manslaughter charge.

At the time of Pirrie’s arrest, a male family member told the Free Press the stabbing “seemed to be” an act of self-defence.

“She didn’t want to (do it),” he said. “If you’d seen the way she was, like how I’d seen her, the day it happened and the couple days after it happened, you would know.”

A witness who lives in the area where Sanchez was stabbed told the Free Press he heard through his open window people shouting at each other around 7 p.m.

Spencer Bucci said when he looked out the window, he saw a group of three or four boys and one girl between the ages of about 10 and 15 in a confrontation with a young woman and young man pushing a stroller with two young children.

“The woman was yelling, ‘Get away from us!’ and ‘Don’t come close to us!’ and it looked like she had a knife in her hand,” Bucci said.

Bucci said he was briefly distracted by the sound of other people yelling down the street and when he turned his attention back to the scene, the boy had already been stabbed.

An off-duty nurse helped police treat Sanchez, who died later that night in hospital.

The victim was the second of six siblings. He was in Grade 7 and enjoyed going to school, his mother, Joni Gabriel, previously told the Free Press.

“He was polite. He had a soft heart,” she said.

Recently, he began running with the wrong crowd, she said.

“He stopped wanting to go (to school), started talking back more to me, hanging around kids I didn’t really like,” Gabriel said. “He was always hanging around with a bit older boys, going with them.

“I’d be telling them, ‘This can’t happen.’ He wouldn’t listen to me.”