Ray Cormier was spotted burning trash outside apartment connected to Tina Fontaine's death
Caroline Barghout, Katie Nicholson, Vera-Lynn Kubinec | CBC News | Posted: November 8, 2016 11:00 AM | Last Updated: November 9, 2016
Winnipeg Police forensic officers spend days combing through Elmwood suite connected to Fontaine investigation
The man charged in the death of Tina Fontaine was seen burning trash outside an Elmwood fourplex just three weeks after the teen's body was discovered in the Red River, according to a provincial agency report.
Raymond Cormier had been staying at a corner apartment suite rented by a woman he knew.
The details of the incident were the focus of a Nov. 28, 2014, Residential Tenancies Commission hearing in which the landlord had unsuccessfully tried to evict the tenant.
According to a hearing report, the landlord claimed Cormier set the fire on or about Sept. 8, 2014. The landlord also said that he had been alerted to the fire by other tenants and rushed to the building.
"[The landlord] attended and found a man, who he later learned was named [Cormier] standing over the embers of the fire. The fire department had been there," the report said.
The report said that "the landlord confronted Mr. Cormier who admitted that he set the fire, and made some incoherent comments about the tenant."
"It appeared that some garbage was burned, but the unit was not damaged," the report said.
The landlord, Michael Knoll, remembers that day clearly.
"I asked [Cormier] if he had set the fire and he said, 'Yes.' And then I asked him why he had set the fire and said something about how he was gathering something and he was trying to get money to help the tenant pay for medicine," Knoll recalled.
Knoll isn't certain what Cormier was burning, but he said he could see metal residue and what looked like plastic in the ashes.
"From what I could see, he often had a lot of scrap metal kicking around. He had shopping carts which I believe he went and took down to some of the scrap metal yards and I believe he was cleaning off metal, or burning plastic off metal or wire," Knoll said.
Cormier said that's exactly what he was doing.
"I was burning wire. I always burn wire," Cormier said in an interview from the Brandon Correctional Centre. CBC News had contacted Cormier about an appeal he filed with the Law Enforcement Review Agency.
- CBC INVESTIGATES: Tina Fontaine's alleged killer says police fabricated evidence
The cleaner the copper, the more money he would get for it, Cormier said.
"It's over two bucks a pound. So there's a big difference," he said.
"If you bring wire, that's not, the plastic and the rubber is not burned off of it, it's called insulated wire and you get nothing for it, or hardly, from the scrap yard," he said.
Cormier said he would usually set the fires down by the river but he remembered being in a rush that day, so he decided to do it in the backyard instead.
"I totally forgot about that. I had burned that one night … it was in the daytime too that I had done it. I didn't have time or something," Cormier said. "There was a reason why I didn't go down to the riverfront and do it. Maybe it was because there wasn't much of it. I'm not sure."
Cormier was charged with second-degree murder last December in the death of Fontaine. He denies any involvement in the homicide.
"I never killed Tina," he said.
His preliminary hearing is scheduled for next May.
Knoll said he saw Cormier at the rental suite a few days after the fire but didn't say anything to him.
On Oct. 1, Knoll said he remembers getting another call from some of the other tenants.
"The police were here. The police had a heavy presence at that unit. When I heard I immediately went over," he said.
However, by the time he got there police and the tenant were gone and the door to the suite was open. Knoll didn't have a key, so he had the locks changed in case the resident didn't return.
"Then around 10 p.m. that night, I get a call from a detective that he was with the tenant and that they needed back inside," Knoll said.
"And so I let them in and they began their investigation that night. They had what I believe was a minivan full of forensic people. They had their suits and masks and everything like that and they began their investigation and I think it went for two to three days."
When Knoll finally re-entered the apartment he said it looked like a scene right out of the police drama CSI.
"There were some dots on walls and ceilings with circles around them which I presumed was something to do with the investigation," Knoll said. "I don't know if it was blood or maybe some kind of chemical [the investigators] used to clean something off … but you could tell something was there that was maybe fluid that kind of went down the wall and sometimes the ceiling. Like splatter."
Winnipeg police had said Cormier and Fontaine frequented a residence in Elmwood, but wouldn't say if the 15-year-old had been killed there.
In a Dec. 11, 2015, press conference, the sergeant of the homicide unit said a tip from the public led detectives to the home shortly after Fontaine's murder.
"It was people in the public that brought us to that general area at first. People who had connections with Tina two or three days before she died", said Sgt. John O'Donovan. "That became extremely important for us to go and identify Raymond Cormier as being one of the people that was in her life in the last few days."
Cormier's interactions with Fontaine
Cormier said he met Fontaine four times over that summer.
The first time, he said was between 3 a.m. and 4 a.m. in mid-July 2014. He was lugging stolen car parts on his shoulder on Charles Street when he said the teenager and her boyfriend called out to him, asking for directions.
Cormier said they smoked pot together and the three of them went to an acquaintance's apartment.
Cormier is now clean-shaven with short, cropped salt and pepper hair, little resembling the wild-eyed, long-haired suspect whose picture was given to media following his December 2015 arrest. He is currently without legal representation after parting ways with three different lawyers provided by legal aid.
Cormier denied he had a sexual relationship with the teen, but admitted they did drugs and drank together. The last time he saw her, he said, was Aug. 6, 2014 when she appeared at the Elmwood address.
"The front doorbell rang and I answered it and it was Tina, and she ran into my arms sobbing," Cormier said.
Her boyfriend had left town, Cormier said, and she told him she didn't have anywhere else to go.
Cormier said he sold a mountain bike she had stolen outside the Maryland Hotel for two grams of pot and a quantity of crystal meth. When he returned to the Elmwood house he said she was mad that he sold the bike and she took off toward the Redwood bridge. He followed her.
"And then she turned around and she stomped her foot down and said, 'I'm homeless'," he said.
"And I threw the pot on the ground by her feet and I said, 'Go jump off a bridge' and I turned around and walked back to [the house]. And when I turned around she threatened that she was going to call police about me having a stolen truck in my possession."
Cormier originally didn't want to say whether he had stolen a truck but later called CBC and said, "Yeah, I did have a stolen truck in my possession on the 6th of August."
"Now the police are gonna try and make you and everyone else believe I killed Tina because she called the police and reported me having a stolen truck, okay? That's how the whole story was presented in the executive summary [in the Crown's case against him]," he said.
He told CBC News police believe he used the stolen truck to transport the body.
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