This story contains details some readers may find disturbing.
Dylan Pountney’s social studies teacher described her classroom’s descent from small chatter to terror and chaos as a student was stabbed in front of the class on March 15, 2021.
In Pountney’s first-degree murder trial in Court of King’s Bench of Alberta before Justice Eric F. Macklin Tuesday, she described her class’s first morning break at 9:34 a.m. at Leduc’s Christ the King High School.
“Before he left, Dylan chatted with me about the weather. We’d been having really nice weather, he brought up that it was very nice outside,” she said.
She thought maybe they’d seen the last of the snow, she responded.
Chitchat with Pountney was nothing new, but earlier he had done something unusual.
He contributed to class discussion.
The lesson of the day was genocide. The text was Understanding Nationalism.
“Dylan put up his hand, which was out of the ordinary, and he asked why Hitler was viewed as the worst person, or that the Holocaust was the worst genocide,” said the teacher, who cannot be identified.
Pountney had suggested Stalin’s genocide was worse.
The kids filtered back into the room.
The victim, Pountney’s stepsister Jennifer Winkler, was at her desk, the teacher said. She was new to the class in mid-February, but known as a member of the school community.
“(Winkler) was sitting at her desk, looking at her phone,” she said.
Suddenly, the teacher observed something out of the corner of her eye, where Pountney’s desk was behind his stepsister’s desk.
“When I looked up, Dylan was stabbing her. I didn’t know what was happening at first. Then when I did know what was happening, I started yelling, ‘What are you doing?’ And to stop.”
He was stabbing Winkler’s upper shoulders and the neck area on Winkler’s left-hand side in “an overhand motion,” she said.
“Initially I almost thought he was hitting her with something,” she said.
Pountney wasn’t saying anything, nor was the victim, she said.
“There wasn’t any words.”
Winkler stood up and turned to try to block him, she recalled.
“He was just continuing to stab her … it was very chaotic, I don’t know the exact number (of times).”
“My brain could not compute,” she said.
“It was very chaotic. It was very intentional, it was non-stop, it just continued,” she said.
“He didn’t stop when she put her hands up, he didn’t stop when I yelled, he just kept going.”
Winkler moved towards the front door of the classroom and collapsed.
The teacher recalled being confused, panicked, and “somewhat frozen.”
“I wasn’t looking at anything during the event other than him and Jenny. Afterwards when he ran out I remember looking at the kids to my right, I remember them looking at me and they were all shocked.
“The next time I saw her she was lying face down at the front of the class,” the teacher said.
She saw the teacher from next door, who had come to the door to see what had happened.
“I told her to call 911.”
“I turned towards the kids and told them to leave, then quickly I realized he could be in the hallway and I told them to stay,” she said.
“I realized I knew what he was wearing, I knew what had happened, so I should call 911.”
Paramedic account
Advanced care paramedic Emily Montgomery and her partner were returning to Leduc Fire Station 1 to restock when they saw the medical call, an EMS Bravo. The fire hall’s deputy chief had gone to the scene but he wasn’t medically trained, so they volunteered because the other team was out on a call.
“Christ the King, scene is secured.”
They were about to find out what that meant.
“My deputy chief was coming out of the doors and said, ‘Hurry up. She’s bleeding out.’”
“We get lots of different information from bystanders, but when he’s coming out and saying that with the panic that he said that, I consider that truthful. So we reacted strongly and rushed,” she said.
“Normally, when we respond to a call, we all maintain a pretty level head, because we’re not there to get frantic. We’re not there to respond to the stress of the scenario. We are there to help negate the stress. So having someone who is in that emergency response field look stressed tells me that there is something to stress about. Something is acutely going on,” she recalled.
An RCMP officer was standing guard, gun drawn.
Winkler was lying unconscious, bleeding out.
“There was a large, excessive amount of blood,” Montgomery remembered. That’s when she called for STARS air ambulance.
“Based off the amount of blood that was around her body at that time, she had lost a large amount, I was very concerned for how to resuscitate her with any fluid because of how much she had lost, and STARS is one of the only services in the area that carries blood. There’s no other ground service that carries blood products. And based off how much blood she lost, I knew that she would need blood in order to buy time to get to the operating table,” she said.
Montgomery estimated Winkler may have lost half her blood volume.
The young woman couldn’t be woken up. She was breathing very shallow and very slow, and they could only detect a carotid pulse, she said.
Moment by moment, her body was shutting down.