Erickson woman recounts attack

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This article was published 16/06/2023 (864 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

WINNIPEG — Drenched in blood and feeling her life slipping away, Candace Richardson says love for her unborn child gave her the strength to survive.

Richardson was attacked during a violent home invasion last week, while asleep in the basement of her Erickson house.

Speaking Thursday from a Winnipeg hospital bed, on the third floor of Health Sciences Centre, the 30-year-old described the traumatic assault.

“I almost gave up,” she said, speaking slowly and with a slight slur, the result of nerve damage from a knife piercing her cheek and entering her mouth.

“I’m pregnant, and we lost our other (child to miscarriage), so wanted to fight for this one,” she said.

“Everybody keeps saying it’s insane that I lived. I just keep thinking it’s insane that I could’ve died.”

Richardson said she was roughly six weeks pregnant at the time of the June 6 attack. According to latest medical reports, the embryo appears to be doing well, she said.

Hundreds of sutures and staples cover the woman’s face, neck and upper body. Splints encase her arms from her elbows to fingertips.

Richardson can’t feel her left hand, due to stab wounds that severed tendons in both of her arms.

“I can feel my pinkie. I’ve got three out of 10 fingers that actually work,” she said, adding her mobility is expected to return in time.

A jagged slash, freshly stitched and slathered in antibacterial salve, runs nearly from ear to ear.

“Have you ever been so tired in your life that you didn’t think you could do one more thing? That’s when I thought I was going to die … I was going in and out (of consciousness), and when I came back, he was cutting my neck,” she said.

“I still don’t really understand why he was in that house, but I think it was just to hurt me because he came right for me.”

Richardson was asleep alone in the basement of her home around 1:55 a.m., when a man broke in and attacked her.

The intruder later fled.

The injured woman managed to cross the street and collapse inside the home of a neighbour — a trained nurse who applied life-saving measures before paramedics arrived.

The following day, Manitoba RCMP arrested a young man outside Erickson Collegiate.

Carter Prince, 18, has been charged with attempted murder, break and enter to commit an indictable offence and possession of a prohibited weapon.

Richardson and fiancé Scott McMunn said they have never met the teen.

Investigators believe the attack was random, RCMP said.

In the days after the attack, Richardson asked family members to enter the home and take a video of the crime scene.

“I know it was hard for my family to film it and send it, but it helped. I don’t want to just erase it,” she said.

The Winnipeg Free Press viewed the footage.

In it, the pillowcases on the bed where Richardson was sleeping are stained with blood. Splatter covers the room and a trail of smears and droplets mark the path the woman took as she staggered up the stairs, into the garage, and out of the home.

Another video shows where McMunn and Richardson believe the intruder slid his hand through a screen and unlocked the door before entering the house.

McMunn has remained by his fiancée’s side since she entered the hospital, sleeping on a cot at her bedside. When a nurse comes to deliver medicine shortly after noon Thursday, McMunn acts as his fiancée’s arms, holding the pills and a paper cup of water to her lips.

“It’s easy when people are here during the day visiting, but I still can’t sleep without having panic attacks every single night,” Richardson said.

“I did get a hotel for the first two days, but never stayed there. There would be no way she could stay here without me because of the night terrors,” McMunn added.

Richardson is set to be discharged from hospital by the end of the week.

The couple, who opened a restaurant in Erickson — located some 80 kilometres north of Brandon — after moving there less than a year ago, do not know what the future holds.

They are the only staff, and Richardson’s recovery will be extensive.

Her arms and hands will be restrained in splints for at least 12 weeks, and the physical and psychological rehabilitation may extend far beyond.

An online fundraiser to support Richardson during her recovery has generated $32,950.

The support from the community and strangers has been overwhelming, she said.

Marasity Boyer has two children with Prince.

Their youngest son was born June 10.

“Sad to say he was in (custody) for his second son, when I was in the hospital,” she said. “The kids are very small, so they don’t know what is going on with their dad.”

In the days before the attack, the young couple were discussing their children’s future.

They are not dating, but Prince had been staying with her and the children periodically, Boyer said.

Boyer said neither she nor Prince knew Richardson — and she believes him to be innocent of the charges against him.

“In my heart, I believe he didn’t do this crime.”

» Winnipeg Free Press