Flett was born in 1971 and was living in Winnipeg. On July 16, 2011, having been thrown out of a party at a rooming house on Austin Street North, she returned and set fire to the building.
Five people died: Norman Anderson, twenty-two; Maureen Harper, fifty-four; Kenneth Monkman, forty-nine; Dean Stranden, forty-four; and Robert Laforte, fifty-six. The house was a low-rent rooming house occupied largely by poor and Indigenous tenants, and it had no working smoke detectors.
She pleaded guilty to five counts of manslaughter rather than murder, the Crown accepting that she had not intended to kill. On June 12, 2013 she received five life sentences to be served concurrently, with parole eligibility after seven years.
The sentence caused public argument in Manitoba, since concurrent terms meant the number of deaths made no difference to the time she would serve before eligibility.
This is a single act, not a serial case, and it is in the archive under that classification. The condition of the building, and who lived in it, is part of the record: five people died in a fire in a house with no working detectors, and that was raised at the sentencing.