A man accused of sexually and physically assaulting a little girl in a wooded area in a northern First Nation is a lifetime registered sex offender with a history of abusing minors.
Another man who had been out for a walk Tuesday in Mathias Colomb Cree Nation, also known as Pukatawagan, said he stumbled across a man sexually assaulting the girl, who is under 10 years old, and tackled him. The accused allegedly threatened the Good Samaritan with a knife, but he managed to get away and call RCMP at about 5:45 p.m.
The girl ran off to a nearby home, where Mounties found her and had her sent to Winnipeg for medical treatment.
RCMP said Thursday the girl was walking down a path when she was attacked. She didn’t know the attacker or the man who intervened, they said.
Officers charged Kyle Dumas, 28, with sexual assault, sexual interference, assault with a weapon, possession of a weapon for a dangerous purpose and failing to comply with orders to avoid unauthorized contact with children under 16.
Dumas has been twice convicted as an adult of sex offences against minors.
In January 2016, Dumas pleaded guilty in provincial court in The Pas to one count of sexual interference for an incident involving a six year old at his grandma’s house the year before.
He regularly went over to his grandmother’s house, Crown prosecutor David Gray told court at Dumas’s sentencing, but she would tell him to leave if the children who lived there were around or no other adults were present. He was already barred by court order from being in contact with children at the time.
One afternoon in August 2015, when his grandmother was out, Dumas showed up and went into a bedroom where one girl was hanging out and a six-year-old girl was sleeping. He told the girl that her friend was looking for her outside, Gray said. When she left, Dumas tried to pull down the sleeping girl’s pants while holding a cellphone, court heard.
The other girl quickly returned and caught him, thinking he was filming the sleeping youngster with the phone, and swore at him to leave.
RCMP found a phone at the scene, which wasn’t capable of recording video or taking photos. Gray said it’s possible there had been another phone, or that Dumas, whom he described as having “limited intellectual capacities,” was trying to take video with an incapable device.
“What we’re concerned with here is a behaviour by Mr. Dumas, an ongoing behaviour, that is risk taking for the community. He seems not to have gotten … that he needs not to be around children,” Gray said during the 2016 case.
“He took steps to take a person who was protecting the little girl out of the room and then took advantage of the situation. That behaviour is extraordinarily risky for little children, and we can’t have little children near Mr. Dumas.”
His lawyer, John Skinner, told court Dumas has developmental issues, noting he spent much of his childhood in foster care in Flin Flon.
Provincial court Judge Malcolm McDonald sentenced Dumas to a year of jail, less time served, and ordered him to register as a sex offender for 1o years.
Dumas was then convicted of sexually exploiting a person under 18 in 2017. He was jailed for 730 days, less time served, and ordered to register as a sex offender for life.
He pleaded guilty to breaching his obligations to the sex offender registry and to failing to appear in court in April this year. He was sentenced to time served.
erik.pindera@freepress.mb.ca
Erik Pindera
Reporter
Erik Pindera is a reporter for the Free Press, mostly focusing on crime and justice. The born-and-bred Winnipegger attended Red River College Polytechnic, wrote for the community newspaper in Kenora, Ont. and reported on television and radio in Winnipeg before joining the Free Press in 2020. Read more about Erik.
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