Youth acted on ‘mass murder suicide plan’

A youth accused of severely injuring a student in a targeted sword attack at a Brandon high school detailed a “mass murder suicide plan” months before the incident, mimicking a racially motivated school killing of three immigrants in Sweden.

The 17-year-old boy unexpectedly pleaded not guilty to nine charges on Tuesday during a scheduled pretrial hearing in Brandon’s Court of King’s Bench before federal Crown attorney Hugh Crawley read an agreed statement of facts.

The Indigenous teen, who can’t be identified under the Youth Criminal Justice Act, is charged with three counts of attempted murder, aggravated assault, two counts of assault with a weapon, wearing a disguise with intent and two counts of possessing a weapon for a dangerous purpose in relation to the June 10, 2025 attack at École secondaire Neelin High School.

His trial is expected to resume in June 2027.

In the months leading up to the attack, the accused wrote in notebooks, calling immigrants — specifically Black and Muslim people — “invaders” who he believed move to Canada despite hating the country and “do monstrous things to Canadians,” said the document, which was provided to the Sun on Thursday.

A 15-year-old victim, who is Black and whose family is from Nigeria, underwent a lengthy surgery at the Brandon hospital for injuries he suffered in the attack, including a severed fingertip and lacerations to both hands, his right shoulder, chest, abdomen, left thigh and left forearm.

The Sun has previously spoken with the victim and his family, but as a youth, he can’t be identified due to a publication ban, Crawley said in an email on Thursday.

According to the agreed statement of facts, the accused — who was a 16-year-old Grade 10 student at the time of the offence — briefly spoke with a friend on the phone hours before the attack, saying he was going through with his plan.

The accused walked through the front entrance of Neelin — which has about 380 students — shortly after 1 p.m., concealing a sword and a knife while wearing black pants and a black trench coat.

He went into a washroom and put on a black “plague” mask with a long beak-like nose that covered most of his face before he walked down the eastside hallway.

The Grade 10 victim, who was walking down the hallway, stopped to compliment the accused’s costume. They spoke for a few seconds until the accused brandished his sword and stabbed the boy multiple times.

The victim tried preventing the attack by grabbing at the sword, which caused “catastrophic” injuries to his hands, the document said.

The accused followed the victim as he ran toward the front foyer into the administration office, passing principal Baseswa Nundu, who originally thought he was playing a joke.

Nundu, who is Black and from the Democratic Republic of Congo, was standing in the hall when the accused rounded the corner and raised the sword above his head as he chased the principal.

Nundu ran into a nearby classroom and held the door closed while the accused stabbed the small glass window by the door, narrowly missing Nundu’s eye.

The accused walked away from the classroom down the east hall and passed by several Caucasian students without reacting. Then the accused chased a student, identified as “B” in the document, down the hall with the sword held above his head.

A Caucasian teacher stopped the accused while student “B” fled to the gym. The teacher was unharmed in the interaction.

In the meantime, several students called 911, as did Nundu, who also ordered a school lockdown.

The accused subsequently went inside a classroom in the east hall and asked four Caucasian students whether “there were any blacks” in there. When the students said “no,” the accused left to wander the halls, which began to empty, until Brandon police officers arrived.

When confronted by police, the teen refused to drop his sword and asked to be shot in the head. Police tased him twice before he dropped the weapon and was handcuffed. He shouted at police, questioning why he wasn’t shot and saying that he wanted to be shot.

Officers seized the sword, mask and a steak knife. The entire incident happened within a seven-minute span.

One of the three officers who escorted the accused down the hall banged the boy’s head against a cement wall, followed by pushing him to the ground and repeatedly hitting his head on the floor.

“The other two officers did not react or respond. One turned her back during the incident,” the document said.

The boy was taken to the Brandon hospital, where he was medically cleared before being interviewed by detectives.

The accused “told every officer he encountered that he was intoxicated,” but he showed no signs of impairment, the agreed statement of facts said.

During his statement to police, the teen said the sword belonged to his sister and he had been practising using it on the bushes in his yard.

He told police he brought a knife to the high school in case the sword became “unavailable,” the document said.

The accused admitted he wanted to “go out with a bang” and “get praise from certain people,” the statement said. He declined to attack the Caucasian kids in the classroom “because they were all white.”

He said he was inspired by Anton Lundin Pettersson, who dressed in black and armed himself with a sword in a racially motivated attack at a school in Trollhattan, Sweden. The man killed three immigrants before he was killed by police in the 2015 case.

“The accused told police the only thing that went different from his plan was that he was not killed by officers,” the document said.

On June 11, 2025, police searched the accused’s home and seized a large black notebook, loose paper and a tablet from his bedroom. They photographed several cardboard weapons in the shape of guns and swords in his room.

The accused’s notebook, which had entries dating back to June 2022, celebrated Hitler, Nazis and his hatred toward Muslims, including threats to kill them.

Police found files on his tablet about various school massacres and images of swastikas. His phone contained thousands of searches in the months leading up to the attack.

Some of the searches included school shootings and domestic terrorism while the other searches were specific to the incident and included “how deadly is a sword slash,” “average police response times in Brandon” and “does it hurt to get shot.”

His phone had 14,538 photos, including images of guns, other weapons and a machete, Nazi-related imagery and photos of himself with cardboard weapons doing a Nazi salute. There were 42 videos on his phone, many of which showed school violence.

He also had several manifestos written by white nationalists on his phone and a document written by the accused that Crown attorneys plan to argue was the beginning of his manifesto.

The teen has been in custody at the Manitoba Youth Centre in Winnipeg since his arrest and was transported to Brandon for his court appearance on Tuesday, Crown attorney Jennifer Comack said in an email on Thursday.

The upcoming trial will rely on evidence seized, the police statement from the accused, witnesses and video surveillance based on more than a dozen cameras in multiple locations in the high school.

» tadamski@brandonsun.com