“She never had altercations with anyone, never. She wasn’t a drama-filled teenager. She mainly focused on her drawings and arts and computer.”
Sean Winkler has some terrible memories of the day his little sister, 17-year-old Jenny, was stabbed to death in her social studies classroom.
But in the wake of her killer’s conviction of second-degree murder last week in Justice Eric F. Macklin’s court in Wetaskiwin, the elder Winkler chooses to focus on Jenny and the joy she brought her family.
Jenny was light-hearted but could be serious, Sean recalled.
“She was always goofy, laughing all the time, and always drawing, very artistic. She had many friends surrounding her, many people loved her.
“She was just a genuine, down-to-earth person. An animal lover, cats and dogs and all sorts of other things,” he said.
“She never had altercations with anyone, never. She wasn’t a drama-filled teenager. She mainly focused on her drawings and arts and computer.”
Jenny Winkler had hopes for college and a career in digital graphic design, he said.
“I had a pretty good relationship with Jenny,” Sean recalled.
“I’d be gone few weeks at a time at work. My most favourite thing that I miss the most is she’d text me, ‘Coming home? When you coming home?’ I’d be like, ‘Oh a few days,’ and she’d say, ‘Aw, that’s stupid,’” he remembered.
And when he came home, he got a big welcome.
“She’d run at me, right into the door, and give me a big bear hug.
“And you know, I don’t get to experience that no more. It was all taken away,” the Leduc resident said.
There was a tenuous family connection between Jenny and her killer, Dylan Pountney. Her dad and Dylan’s mom, Melanie Pountney, had a child together, but the two had broken up prior to Melanie’s death to cancer in 2016.
Things weren’t as Dylan Pountney’s rambling statement to police suggested, Sean said.
“Comparing what (Dylan) says to compared to what I remember, our childhood was like two different stories,” he said.
Search for the killer
He can’t forget March 15, 2021, the day the tragedy unfolded.
He was living in Millet, a town 40 km south of Edmonton, and getting ready to go to Calgary for a course.
“I get a call from my dad — Jenny’s been stabbed at school by Dylan Pountney,” he said.
He jumped in his truck with a buddy and “high-tailed it as fast as my truck could possibly go, to Leduc,” he recalled. Millet is about 20 km south of Leduc.
“I had like a strobe system in my truck at the time. I turned that on … I literally drove right down the dead center of the highway from Millet to Leduc and almost burnt my truck to the ground. Everyone was moving out of the way. They saw me and just moved out of the way.”
He parked as close as he could to Christ the King High School, where both Jenny and Pountney had been in social studies class.
“I started running up to that road there where my stepfather and my stepmother were waiting. And as I’m running up, I see STARS air ambulance coming in and that’s when I realized how severe this was. And I dropped to my knees and cried,” he remembered.
There was a detective outside the school.
“I asked him, ‘Did you guys get him yet?’ He said no. I got quite aggressive with him,” Winkler admitted
The officer told him to calm down, and Sean and his buddy ran back to the truck to look through the familiar neighbourhood streets for Pountney, who was on the run on foot.
One of Winkler’s best friends had heard the terrible news; his sister was best friends with Jenny.
“He was on the side of the road, crying … that’s when Dylan opened his car door,” Sean said.
Dylan Pountney recounted the carjacking attempt in his statement to the RCMP that afternoon, recalling he’d said “Get out of the car, bitch,” and was shocked when it was a man in the car, and that the man was visibly angry with him, and appeared to try to run him over.
“The way my friend looked at him with anger, it actually scared Dylan and he just grabbed the smokes and ran off. Then my friend tried to clip him with his vehicle,” Sean said.
From there, Pountney hopped a fence to get away, but Sean’s friend yelled to attract the searchers’ attention, and said, “Hey! He’s over there!”
Ultimately, Pountney was discovered not too far away, crouching under a deck in the Robinson area, and he surrendered to police.
A family friend gave Sean a lift to the University of Alberta where he met his mom at the U of A Stollery Children’s Hospital.
“She said, ‘She didn’t make it.’ I dropped to my knees, and life just took a 180. I went downhill a while,” he recalled.
Then, one day, a friend came to call, bearing flowers and condolences.
For Sean, life began anew with the kind young woman who would soon become his wife.
“My wife saved my life from God knows what path I would’ve taken, you know?”
His family’s life took another sad and strange turn five months later, when Sean got a call from his mom.
His stepbrother Adam, who he was close to, had been driving when he struck a moose.
“You better get here now to say goodbye,” he was told.
Once again, off to the U of A hospital for a sad farewell, too much for any family.
‘For me, it’s pure anger’
Sean Winkler said processing Pountney’s trial was difficult — video of Pountney running in and out of the classroom, classmates testifying, the autopsy report.
“Some pictures were incidentally shown that no family should see and everyone saw them,” he recalled.
Long before the trial, sadness gave way to another scorching emotion for Sean.
“For me, it’s pure anger,” he said, recalling that he felt Pountney had tried to “play the system.”
Justice Eric F. Macklin found Pountney guilty of second-degree murder.
Although it wasn’t the severity of punishment Sean felt Pountney deserved, he was glad of the conviction.
“It’s not what we wanted — we want him put away as long as possible, but it’s better than manslaughter, and that’s what the defence was trying to get him,” Sean said.
His memories can’t be taken away — Jenny’s name is tattooed on his right forearm.
And one of his two tiny daughters with wife Chantel has the middle name of Jenny.