A mentally ill Winnipeg man who randomly attacked an 83-year-old woman on the street and was on the verge of beating her with her walker when passersby intervened has been sentenced to five years in prison.
“The victim’s age and the fact that she was using a walker made her exceptionally vulnerable, and that vulnerability would have been obvious to anyone who saw her,” provincial court Judge Michelle Bright said at a sentencing hearing Wednesday for 28-year-old Justin Getty.
“One can only imagine the potential outcome had the accused been allowed to continue the assault unimpeded.”
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The February 2025 attack left 83-year-old Victoria Comeau hospitalized.
Getty, who has been diagnosed with schizophrenia and is addicted to meth, pleaded guilty last winter to aggravated assault for the February 2025 attack on Victoria Comeau.
Comeau had left her 55-plus apartment building at Elgin Avenue and Ellen Street around noon to pick up some milk when Getty approached her from behind and punched and kicked her, knocking her to the ground.
Getty swore at the woman and continued to kick her before picking up her walker and raising it over his head. Passersby intervened before Getty could strike the woman with the walker and he ran away.
Comeau spent three months in hospital. She was not eligible for surgery due to her frailty and is no longer able to walk independently.
“The impact on Ms. Comeau and her family… has been significant, not only in relation to the physical injuries that she suffered, but also her independence and sense of safety,” Bright said. “Before the incident, she said that she felt like she knew people on the street and was never scared to be out on her own. Now she feels terrified to leave the confines of her home.”
Following the attack, Getty returned to his home in a supportive housing facility for people with mental health issues and told a staff member he had “assaulted an old lady and stomped on her.” A manager at the facility contacted police, who arrested Getty a week later.
Getty, who has a long history of hallucinations and meth-addiction-related mental health issues, entered his guilty plea after a months-long, court-ordered assessment of his mental fitness. He’s been frequently hospitalized for his psychosis.
During an interview with police following his arrest, Getty told investigators spiders were inside his body and O.J. Simpson, the late former professional football player acquitted of killing his wife, was trying to eat him alive.
Getty has previous convictions for assaulting his probation officer and a support worker. At the time of the attack on Comeau, Getty was on bail and going through mental health court for one of the previous assaults, but was kicked out of the program and sentenced in regular provincial court last year.
Bright said she agreed with the findings of a forensic assessment report that concluded Getty’s attack on the victim was impacted by his schizophrenia diagnosis, but not to the point he didn’t know his actions were wrong.
According to a pre-sentence report prepared earlier this year after Getty’s mental condition had stabilized, he told a probation officer he didn’t care what happened to the victim and that if she was badly hurt it was only because she was old. He blamed his schizophrenia and meth use for the crime.
Following his arrest and while receiving psychiatric treatment and regular medication, Getty “continu(ed) to demonstrate a concerning lack of remorse for the impact of the offending on the victim,” Bright said.
During an April 2025 meeting with a mental health court worker, Getty said he would use his schizophrenia diagnosis in his court defence, “which suggests to me that the accused views his mental illness as a justification for his offending,” Bright said.
Over the course of several interviews with psychiatrists, Getty provided conflicting versions of events, claiming in one interview that he had been hearing voices, and in another that he attacked the victim to vent his anger after he had been assaulted and was acting like a “predator.”
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“I didn’t give a s—-,” he said in one interview. “I didn’t feel remorseful, she deserved it.”
At a sentencing hearing last March, Getty apologized for his actions, saying he would stay off drugs and never assault anyone again.
Bright rejected Getty’s expression of remorse.
“I find it difficult to accept the accused’s in-court expressions of those feelings and his promises to change his behaviour based on his well-documented history of expressing the opposite and his insistence that what he did was not a big deal,” Bright said.
dean.pritchrd@freepress.mb.ca
Dean Pritchard is courts reporter for the Free Press. He has covered the justice system since 1999, working for the Brandon Sun and Winnipeg Sun before joining the Free Press in 2019. Read more about Dean.
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