Police observe suspicious death on Elgin Avenue

The Winnipeg Police Service is investigating after an adult man was found dead Sunday under suspicious circumstances in an Elgin Avenue apartment.

Police have released few details of the incident. Two patrol cars remained on the scene near Isabel Street in West Alexander Monday morning.

A patrol car was parked on Elgin Avenue; another remained behind the two-story gray stucco apartment block. An unmarked police van was found near yellow crime scene tape that wrapped an adjacent vacant lot.

Ken and Beatrice Wainwright were shocked when they got home from running Sunday errands around 4 pm to their rental house on Elgin Avenue to find numerous police officers in the neighboring building.

“The forensic truck was there until three or four in the morning,” Beatrice said. “I was very shocked… I told my husband: ‘Something bad must have happened.’”

The Wainwrights said the apartment was home to quiet, hard-working people, in contrast to nearby drug houses and a troubled apartment block.

“Nothing ever happens,” Ken said of the apartment where the man was found dead. “Only very quiet people.”

In the decade or so that the Wainwrights lived next door, they couldn’t once recall the police at 480 Elgin Ave.

“That was the first time something happened there. The people next door are really good, we always talked to them, they were all polite, they all worked,” said Beatrice.

“Very good neighbors.”

Beatrice said a police officer came to speak to them on Sunday, but the couple had little information to offer.

The block and adjoining neighborhood have gone downhill recently, as drugs and crime spread, the couple said.

“It bothers me,” Ken said. “I just have no use for it.”

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Twitter: @erik_pindera