Boy, 15, charged in attack on girl in CFS care

WINNIPEG — Police have arrested and charged a 15 year old boy in the brutal attack on a teenage girl in downtown Winnipeg Wednesday.

Both the victim and suspect are wards of Child and Family Services who had been placed in foster care at the same downtown hotel, within a few blocks of the crime scene.

Police say the suspect flagged down officers at Hargrave Street and St. Mary Avenue shortly before 5 a.m. on Wednesday. The 15 year old girl was unconscious and critically injured from a brutal attack.

Police say CFS reported the girl missing 11 minutes after officers found her. She remains in hospital in critical condition with what friends say are serious head injuries.

The 15 year old boy is charged with aggravated assault and aggravated sexual assault.

The latest revelations will send more shock waves through Manitoba’s NDP government, already reeling from word Wednesday that yet another child in CFS care had become the victim of violent crime.

The province’s Family Services minister Kerri Irvin-Ross fought back tears at a hastily called afternoon news conference to announce that all kids in CFS care living in hotels would be moved to safer locations by June 1st.

News that the alleged attacker, too, was supposedly being supervised by CFS in the same hotel adds to the pressure on the government long criticized for mishandling CFS matters.

Read more: Downtown assault victim is teen in CFS care, province confirms

“(Wednesday’s) horrible tragedy shows that we need to move faster,” Irvin-Ross said Wednesday. “Therefore I have ordered the department to immediately find alternative safe places for children who are currently in hotels,” she said.

Irvin-Ross promised in November, 2014 to wind down the use of hotels to house kids in CFS care, but didn’t commit to a deadline. That initiative was in response to the case of Tina Fontaine, a 15-year-old girl who had been in CFS care in a downtown Winnipeg hotel and was found dead, wrapped in a plastic bag in the Red River in August, 2014. Police say she was murdered but have made no arrests.

Read more: Manitoba wants fewer kids in care put up in hotels

A friend of the victim, also a CFS client living at the hotel within a few blocks of the crime scene, told Global News that CFS staff supervise the kids but don’t attempt to stop them if they leave the premises.