EDMONTON – Thirty-six years before he shot two men in an Edmonton car dealership, Dave Burns stabbed a Winnipeg teen in the heart after a fight over spilled beer and a torn shirt.
Burns pleaded guilty to manslaughter in 1974 for killing Garvin Dale Inglis, 18. He was sentenced to four years in prison.
“Basically, after he went to prison, he vanished,” a former classmate said.
Until Friday, when he walked into Great West Chrysler, killed one co-worker, critically wounded another, then shot himself.
“For years and years, it was always, whatever happened to Dave Burns?” said the classmate, who didn’t want his name used.
“I always thought, maybe he would have learned a lesson or something.”
The story of Burns’s early crime is laid out in press accounts from the period.
A Winnipeg Free Press story from Oct. 1974 says Inglis went to a party in February of that year looking for a fight. He spilled a drink on Burns and the two fought, the story says, but not seriously.
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Later that night, Burns found Inglis and told him he owed him $2 for tearing his shirt. The two teens went outside to fight again and Burns pulled out a knife to frighten Inglis. In the fracas, Inglis was stabbed once, a wound that reached four inches into the centre of his heart.
According to the story, Burns was originally charged with murder. He pleaded guilty to the lesser charge because the Crown felt they could not prove conclusively that he meant to kill Inglis.
Burns’s classmate, who now lives in the United States, was at the party where the stabbing happened.
“We were probably 18 because it was like a social and everybody was drinking. Dave Burns told me and some other people he was at an army surplus store that afternoon and he stole one of these flip knives or some kind of weird knife,” the man said.
“I left early with my girlfriend. The next morning I get a bunch of calls from my buddies, they go, `Do you know what happened,’ I said no. They said, `Dave Burns stabbed a guy.”’
His friends told the man that the fight started when Inglis squeezed Burns’s hand and spilled his plastic cup of beer. Burns, the man was told, said he took out the knife to scare Inglis and that Inglis fell on top of it.
The classmate remembered Burns as a skinny kid who was into cars.
“I don’t think it was like a bad temper, I think it was just being in the wrong place at the wrong time and having a knife and thinking, `I’ve got a knife, I’ve got to protect myself.”’
According to the Winnipeg Free Press, the party was Feb. 9, 1974. Burns was sentenced on Oct. 4, 1974.
The classmate said that no one heard anything about Burns after he was sent to jail, at least until Friday.
After employees of Great West identified Burns as the shooter, a 1994 video surfaced of him speaking to the local news. His high school classmates immediately recognized the man who, decades earlier, stabbed Inglis to death, went to jail, and disappeared from their lives.
After leaving prison, Burns married an Edmonton woman, according to court documents. They divorced in 2000 after 21 years of marriage. Friends say he had remarried.
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