Man previously acquitted in Tina Fontaine murder arrested in Ottawa

A man acquitted in the 2014 murder of a First Nations teenage girl has been arrested in Ottawa for allegedly breaking into numerous apartment buildings dating back to mid-January.

Police say 59-year-old Raymond Joseph Cormier targeted apartments, parking garages, mail and storage rooms in four residential apartment buildings in Ottawa. According to records, Cormier appeared in an Ottawa court Friday morning for a bail hearing.

Back in 2015, Cormier was charged with second-degree murder in the death of 15-year-old Tina Fontaine, whose body was found in a bag in Winnipeg’s Red River on Aug. 17, 2014. A jury found Cormier not guilty of Fontaine’s death in 2018.

Her murder remains unsolved.

Fontaine’s murder helped spark a national debate on the fate Indigenous women and girls, and eventually led to the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls.