As day turned to night, April 26, 2023, Tyrus Mann spent hours pushing a laundry bin around at Main Street and Disraeli Freeway, stopping to chat with friends, chow down on a slice of pizza from an outreach worker and visit a homeless shelter.
No one who encountered Mann, including two beat cops who walked past him on the street, knew that amongst the debris piled in the laundry cart was the body of 45-year-old Ryan Cory Monias, who Mann had beaten to death or unconsciousness hours earlier.
“Whether he was dead at that instant, we don’t know,” Crown attorney Boyd McGill told King’s Bench Justice Rick Saull at a sentencing hearing Tuesday, describing the killing as “bizarre and unnerving to the highest degree.”
Mann, who later that night set Monias’s body ablaze in a Point Douglas parking lot, pleaded guilty to manslaughter and was sentenced to 12 years in prison.
Court heard Mann lives with a “veritable alphabet of disorders,” including schizophrenia and alcohol-related neurological disorder, and is “extremely low functioning” with an IQ of 50.
McGill and defence lawyer Amanda Sansregret jointly recommended the 12-year sentence, which McGill said “takes into account (Mann’s) limitations.”
According to an agreed statement of facts previously provided to court, Mann and Monias were at the Manwin Hotel on Main Street when Mann, believing Monias was a “skinner” (street slang for a sex offender), assaulted and “incapacitated” Monias.
Mann strapped Monias’s body inside a sleeping bag, then placed it in a laundry bin, covered it with scavenged debris, and wheeled the bin to the area of Our Relatives Place homeless shelter on Disraeli Freeway around 7:30 p.m.
Mann “herded (Monias’s body) around for hours, like luggage,” until shortly after midnight when he wheeled the bin to a warehouse parking lot on Gomez Street, where he set it on fire, McGill said.
Security video played in court showed Mann leaving the parking lot as the laundry bin was engulfed in a roaring ball of flame.
Teenagers driving by a short time later “couldn’t quite believe their eyes” and called 911, McGill said.
An autopsy could not determine how Monias died and described him as being “cooked to the bone.” The autopsy showed no evidence of smoke in Monias’s lungs, suggesting he was already dead when Mann set fire to his body.
Police arrested Mann days later in an unrelated stabbing the same day Monias was killed and recovered a knife later found to have blood on it matching Monias’s DNA.
Mann, who was not yet a suspect in Monias’s killing, was released on an undertaking and then rearrested May 2 for an unrelated offence. A day later, police connected Mann to Monias’s death and arrested him for committing an indignity on human remains.
Mann “voluntarily” confessed and told police he became angry with Monias, thinking he was a sex offender, and “snapped” his neck before “fold(ing) him like a pretzel” and placing the body in a sleeping bag, said the agreed statement of facts.
Mann received credit for time served, reducing his remaining sentence to approximately 10 1/2 years.
dean.pritchard@freepress.mb.ca
Dean Pritchard
Courts reporter
Dean Pritchard is courts reporter for the Free Press. He has covered the justice system since 1999, working for the Brandon Sun and Winnipeg Sun before joining the Free Press in 2019. Read more about Dean.
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