A 40-year-old Ontario man with a long and violent criminal history including a previous home invasion has been charged with second-degree murder in connection with the slaying of Tori Dunn at her Surrey, B.C., home this month.
The Integrated Homicide Investigation Team says in a statement that Adam Mann was found by Surrey police while they were on their way to Ms. Dunn’s home on June 16.
At the time of Ms. Dunn’s killing, Mr. Mann was facing an unrelated aggravated assault charge for an alleged attack in Surrey three weeks earlier and is due in court for that case on July 2.
Mr. Mann was once deemed an “unmanageable risk” unsuitable for community supervision, in a pre-sentencing report after he was convicted of a home invasion in Ontario more than a decade ago.
Ms. Dunn’s father Aron posted on Facebook days after she was killed that his daughter was also the victim of a home invasion.
Police said on June 28 they found Ms. Dunn with life-threatening injuries after being called to her home.
They said Mr. Mann remains in custody, and the investigation continued into the “tragic event” that “has shaken the entire community.”
Court records in B.C., Ontario and New Brunswick show Mr. Mann has a criminal history dating back decades.
In 2009, he was sentenced to 12 years in prison for robbery and various weapons offences in connection with a home invasion, which he unsuccessfully appealed.
The Ontario Court of Appeal ruling in 2010 regarding that sentence said Mr. Mann had racked up 22 previous convictions by the age of 25, including violent offences involving firearms and robberies.
The ruling said that a pre-sentence report on Mr. Mann was “very bleak,” and that he once described stabbing a female victim as “like a knife going through butter.”
The report said Mr. Mann was “not suitable for community supervision, as he appears to be an unmanageable risk while in the community.”
In December 2014, Mr. Mann was convicted of assault after spitting on two employees of the Atlantic Institution in Renous, New Brunswick, where he was incarcerated.
A 2015 ruling from the Court of Appeal of New Brunswick said Mr. Mann had become “upset” with the pair after a Segregation Review Board hearing, and he unsuccessfully appealed the assault conviction, representing himself in court as he was “well acquainted with the criminal justice system.”
Online court records in B.C. show Mr. Mann also has a long criminal history in the province.
In 2021, he was found guilty of publication of an intimate image without consent, an offence that occurred in Abbotsford.
In March this year, Mr. Mann was found guilty of possessing a weapon for dangerous purpose, and wilfully resisting or obstructing a peace office. He was then found guilty of breaching a probation order on June 5.
Court records show Mr. Mann is due in Surrey Provincial Court on July 2 in relation to an alleged aggravated assault that occurred in Surrey on May 26 this year.
Premier David Eby said at an unrelated news conference on Monday that the situation involving Mr. Mann, whose name hadn’t been released publicly then, raised many questions because he was facing criminal charges and Crown prosecutors had urged a judge not to release him back into the community.
“And the judge made the decision to release this person back into the community where he’s alleged to have committed another horrific crime,” Mr. Eby said.
“In this situation, the judge is applying the federal criminal law, and obviously there were some issues that prevented the judge from making the decision to hold that person in jail while he waited for sentencing on the original crime. Now he’s back in jail where he should have been, and the family is right to ask those questions. I’m asking those questions.”
Mr. Eby said it was “beyond unacceptable” and vowed to “get to the bottom of how it could be that this keeps happening in our communities, even when the Crown is seeking the detention of the individual, even when we’ve asked the federal government to change the federal bail rules, and … we continue to see this happening.”
