Convicted rapist and high-risk offender with violent past released to live in Winnipeg: police

A violent sexual offender with a slew of convictions, including for choking and raping a woman, assaulting fellow inmates and threatening law enforcement, has served his time and is expected to take up residence in Winnipeg, according to police.

In a warning to the community late last week , the Manitoba Integrated High Risk Sex Offender Unit said Jason Mark Bard, 35, had been released from the Winnipeg Remand Centre. He had been serving a four-year, 135-day sentence for “repeatedly stabbing” another inmate at the province’s Stony Mountain Institution, leaving them with a collapsed lung, and for later spitting in a correctional officer’s face.

While Bard’s sexual assault conviction came in 2015, the unit said he “remains a high risk to re-offend in a sexually violent manner against all adult females,” even though he has completed sexual offender treatment in the past.

In September 2012, just after completing a three-year sentence for aggravated assault, a 21-year-old Bard was arrested and charged with sexual assault, confinement, choking, and uttering threats in his hometown of Edmonton.

The day before, Bard and his friends met a group of women at a local bar, where he danced and drank with one woman in particular, the Edmonton Journal reported from the subsequent court proceedings at the time.

After a night of revelry, Later that night, the woman accompanied the men to purchase drugs. During testimony, one of those men said Bard said he would have sex with the woman “whether she liked it or not” and asked if “he wanted to go halfsies on a rape charge.”

Hours later, Bard offered to walk the woman to a bus stop, only to throw her to the ground and proceed to rape her. During the attack, he choked her to near unconsciousness, punched her when she tried to call for help and threatened to stab her and her family if she told anyone.

A couple walking by heard the cries for assistance and called police, and Bard fled with the woman’s phone before they arrived.

The woman’s DNA was later found on Bard’s underwear, but he said in court that it was because they’d been sexually active inside the bar’s bathroom earlier that evening. He also claimed the woman must have been attacked after he left her at the bus stop.

Court of Queen’s Bench Justice Eldon Simpson didn’t buy it and described Bard’s “fabricated” testimony as “utter nonsense.”

“He said he’d help her, then betrayed her,” Simpson said at Bard’s sentencing in January 2015, as reported by the Journal.

After receiving three years and nine months credit for the 28 months he spent in pre-trial custody, Bard was left with 15 months to serve, followed by 18 months on probation.

At some point in 2018, Bard relocated to Inuvik, N.W.T., where it wasn’t long before he had another brush with the law, according to Northern News Service Ltd. (NNSL).

In September of that year, RCMP officers responding to a complaint about bear spray used in a fight involving two men ended up in a foot chase with Bard. When cornered, Bard, who was bound by an Alberta probation order and barred from possessing any weapons, pointed the spray at the officers, prompting both to draw their guns and demand he drop the weapon. He was eventually tackled to the ground.

While awaiting trial at North Slave Correctional Complex in Yellowknife, Bard randomly attacked a fellow inmate, bashing his head with a plastic cup before pummelling him with his fists. NNSL reported that a three-hour standoff between Bard and correctional officers ensued.

The inmate who was attacked later tried to sue the territorial government, alleging correctional staff hadn’t done their due diligence by learning about Bard’s violent tendencies and therefore did not take reasonable measures to prevent the attack.

In the judge’s decision dismissing the statement of claim ,, it noted that two weeks before the attack, Bard told NSCC officers he had a hidden weapon which he intended to use against them.

Less than two years earlier, records indicated that while incarcerated at the Calgary Correctional Centre, Bard “stabbed another inmate several times in the face with a pen because (he) thought the other inmate was talking about him.”

Police in Calgary also provided psychological reports that labelled Bard a “dangerous violent offender with antisocial personality disorder.”

According to NNSL, 12 weeks after the unprovoked assault on the inmate at NSCC, Bard had another standoff with officers, this time threatening to stab them in vulnerable areas with weapons he’d fashioned out of a sprinkler head and electrical siding.

Officials needed a negotiator to end the standoff, which resulted in close to $25,000 in damages to the facility when Bard decided to flood the floor of his cell.

He pleaded guilty to a raft of charges related to the three separate incidents and was sentenced to 27 months. With credit for time served, he was left with roughly a year and a half behind bars, followed by three years of probation.

By September 2021, Bard, now residing in Manitoba, was serving time at Stoney Creek for an undisclosed offence when he stabbed another inmate and received his most recent sentence.

Bard, who stands five-foot-three and weighs 183 pounds, has brown eyes and brown hair and identifies as Métis. He has several identifiable tattoos: tribal work, a devil and a backward “P” and “D” on his left upper arm; the word “KRUNK” on his right hand; and a cross reading “REST IN PEACE/EDWARD BONE” on his right calf.

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