Valentine’s Day dispute ends with woman badly burned

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This article was published 18/02/2019 (1883 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The caretaker of a Portage la Prairie apartment complex said he will long be haunted by scenes from a near-deadly Valentine’s Day domestic dispute that allegedly ended in arson.

On the night of Feb. 14, Peter Mackie, whose job includes living in the five-unit apartment building on the 100 block of 5th St. N.W. in Portage, said he heard a dispute break out between a couple in the basement suite of the complex.

The downstairs tenant, who had been living at the complex for about seven months, is a native of Morocco who had been living and working in Canada with his wife, Mackie said.

“He started yelling at her, ‘Get out! Get out! Get out of my apartment. Leave me alone.’ The floors here are very thin. I could hear everything going on downstairs. This wasn’t the first time something like this had happened,” Mackie said.

He said it sounded like the man attempted to “grab her and try to push her outside, up the concrete steps that go out.”

While concerned about the altercation, Mackie said it began to sound like the two of them were calming down. He said similar altercations had happened before and they’d been resolved. Eventually, however, the argument started again.

“She started saying things like, ‘Stop that. What are you doing? Stop it. You’re going to start a fire.’ It escalated and then she starts saying, ‘You’re starting a fire. Stop, you’re starting a fire,’” Mackie said.

“Her voice started to increase with concern. It really started to increase until she was yelling at him, ‘Let me out. I’m having a hard time breathing. I don’t want to die. I can’t breathe. Let me out. I don’t want to die.’”

It was then that Mackie said he called 911. Although the fire alarms had yet to go off in the building, he believed the downstairs tenant had set a fire in his apartment.

As RCMP officers pulled up in their cruisers at 1:25 a.m. on Feb. 15, Mackie said he ran downstairs into the basement unit where thick, black smoke was billowing out the door. He said what he saw down there is seared into his mind.

“This giant thick black cloud of smoke and heat came out. I inhaled a good lungs-full of it. There was (the woman) standing there. She was on fire. Her whole backside was on fire. The back of her legs, the back of her arms, her hair was on fire,” Mackie said.

He said he’s convinced if he had called 911 even a minute later, the woman would be dead.

Mackie said he’s been in contact with the woman’s mother who told him her daughter is being treated in a Winnipeg hospital and is suffering from second degree burn wounds on roughly 80 per cent of her body.

RCMP has charged the 38-year-old man who lived in the basement suite of the complex with attempted murder, arson with disregard for human life and forcible confinement. The investigation continues.

ryan.thorpe@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @rk_thorpe