It’s been barely a week since he was released, but the man known as the”Mill Woods rapist” has been re-arrested for breaking the rules he must follow as a registered sex offender.
Edmonton police said Dana Michael Fash failed to comply with his Sex Offender Information Registration Act (SOIRA) conditions, but did not say exactly what he did to warrant being taken back into custody.
Fash was released from custody after the second-degree murder charge he previously faced was stayed on Feb. 13.
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In December 2016, Fash, 40, was charged with second-degree murder in the death of Jeanette Marie Cardinal. Cardinal’s body was found in an apartment suite on 119 Avenue and 81 Street in February 2011.
After Fash was released, Alberta Justice said senior Crown prosecutors thoroughly examined the case and determined it “no longer met the prosecution standard of ‘reasonable likelihood of conviction,’ based on changes in the evidence.”
Violent history
Fash was handed a 12-year sentence in 1997 for sexually assaulting two women. One was a 44-year-old janitor he attacked with scissors in a staff washroom at Malcolm Tweddle Elementary School in Mill Woods. Another was a grandmother he attacked at knifepoint.
Both attacks took place in 1994 when he was 16 years old, but he was tried as an adult.
In 2009, he was put behind bars again for breaching his conditional release, which required he abstain from drugs and alcohol.
Wil Tonowski was the detective in charge of the Edmonton Police Service’s high-risk offender section for about a decade before he retired in 2007. He has assessed Fash in the past and describes him as “a very big, strong man with some strong deviant and violent tendencies.”
“Back in my day, we had decided as a team that he remained a high risk to reoffend,” Tonowski said. “He did take a number of programs that are designed to reduce his risk to the community, but there were still concerns that he wasn’t really internalizing that information.”
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Edmonton police issued a warning on Feb. 13 when Fash was released, saying investigators believed he “will commit another violent offence against someone while in the community.”
Police said Fash would be living in the Edmonton area and that he has a “history of breaking and entering residences or other public buildings and sexually assaulting known or unknown adult females within.”
Tonowski said police don’t make the decision lightly to issue public warnings like that.
“Police don’t release information about low risk or moderate risk because there’s hundreds and hundreds of them, unfortunately,” he said.
“These are the worst of the worst. When police have to go and tell people, ‘This is a bad individual,’ people should actually take a look at that picture and try to avoid that individual if they can.”
On Friday, an EPS spokesperson said investigators have requested Fash remain in police custody for three days to allow for preparations for a bail hearing.
— With files from Caley Ramsay and Phil Heidenreich, Global News