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Pembroke dentist Dr. Christy Natsis has been found guilty of impaired driving causing death and dangerous driving causing death in a 2011 highway crash that killed Bryan Casey.
Natsis was entirely within Casey’s lane and impaired by alcohol the night their two vehicles collided on Hwy 17 near Arnprior on March 31, 2011, a judge has ruled.
Ontario Court Justice Neil Kozloff found that Natsis never braked or even slowed down before slamming her Ford Expedition into Casey’s Dodge Dakota pick-up, even as Casey braked and tried to get out of the way.
Natsis had been impaired from the moment she backed into a car in the parking lot of a Kanata bar where she had been drinking wine and was still impaired when she finally slammed into Casey’s vehicle, Kozloff ruled.
Widow of Bryan Casey embraced Casey's father in courtroom. LeeEllen Carroll hugged supporters outside of court. #ottnews
— Andrew Seymour (@andrew_seymour) May 29, 2015
The conviction is likely to result in prison for Christy Natsis. That's the going rate for impaired driving causing death. #ottnews
— Andrew Seymour (@andrew_seymour) May 29, 2015
The driving was a danger to the public and was to blame for causing Casey’s death, the judge said.
Immediately following the verdict, Casey’s widow, LeeEllen Carroll, hugged her husband’s father in the front row of the courtroom.
The guilty verdicts marked the end of a marathon trial that began in November 2012 and stretched over 55 days.
Natsis’s highly skilled legal team of Michael Edelson, Vince Clifford and Solomon Friedman did their best throughout to batter the credibility and reliability of the more than two dozen Crown witnesses. They also succeeded in having the most damning evidence the Crown possessed against Natsis tossed out.
Breath readings that showed Natsis had a blood-alcohol level nearly 2 1/2 times the legal limit to drive were thrown out after the judge decided that OPP lead investigator Const. Ryan Besner violated Natsis’s right to speak with a lawyer by repeatedly interrupting — and eventually hanging up on — a 40-minute call to her lawyer made from a windowless hospital bathroom in Arnprior.
Besner explained during the trial that he believed he was getting “jerked around” by Natsis, who was lying on the floor of the bathroom with her feet up on the toilet by the time he ended the call. Witnesses at the crash scene along with an emergency room doctor who treated Natsis for an abrasion on her knee said she smelled of alcohol.
One paramedic testified that the smell of alcohol on Natsis was so strong that he turned on the ambulance’s ventilation fans.
That same paramedic testified that Casey’s injuries were so grave that he floored his ambulance — racing at speeds of up to 160 km/h, even though Ottawa paramedic policy says they shouldn’t go faster than 140 km/h — in order to get the dying man to hospital in Ottawa quicker.
Casey, 50, suffered a broken femur, hip and pelvis and was bleeding to death internally when he went into cardiac arrest in the ambulance. Blood samples from Casey later showed that he too had a blood-alcohol level that was 1 1/2 times the legal limit to drive.
One of the Crown’s first witnesses testified that Casey pleaded with her for help when she came upon him trapped in his pickup truck.
Bryan Casey, 50, died March 31, 2011 after a two-vehicle crash on Highway 17 near Arnprior. Christy Natsis has been charged with drunk driving causing death and dangerous driving causing death.
The defence spent a considerable portion of their attack focused on the quality of the OPP investigation and their collision investigators. The defence alleged the testimony of collision investigator Const. Shawn Kelly revealed him to be a “biased, incompetent, incredible and unreliable investigator” and suggested little weight should be put on his analysis of the crash scene.
The judge agreed, to an extent, by refusing to accept portions of Kelly’s testimony as expert evidence in a mid-trial ruling, finding that the veteran police officer was biased and withheld evidence favourable to Natsis from her defence lawyers.
Crown prosecutors called evidence which they argued showed that the crash happened in Casey’s lane. The Crown also relied on data recorded by computer modules that record speed and other data from within both Natsis’s and Casey’s respective vehicles that they argue show Casey slowed and pulled to the right while Natsis kept a steady speed and didn’t brake in the moments before the crash.
In their lengthy 619-page closing submissions, Natsis’s defence lawyers argued that a large portion of the Ford’s data was corrupted and lost. It was also done by engineers who had never performed the task before.
The OPP report into the collision was also rife with errors and inconsistencies, the defence contended. Indeed, the collision investigator Kelly admitted in court he confused perhaps the most critical finding of his report. Kelly had mistakenly written the crash occurred in Natsis’s westbound lane, when he meant to conclude that it occurred in Casey’s eastbound lane.
aseymour@ottawacitizen.com
Twitter.com/andrew_seymour
查看原文...
Natsis was entirely within Casey’s lane and impaired by alcohol the night their two vehicles collided on Hwy 17 near Arnprior on March 31, 2011, a judge has ruled.
Ontario Court Justice Neil Kozloff found that Natsis never braked or even slowed down before slamming her Ford Expedition into Casey’s Dodge Dakota pick-up, even as Casey braked and tried to get out of the way.
Natsis had been impaired from the moment she backed into a car in the parking lot of a Kanata bar where she had been drinking wine and was still impaired when she finally slammed into Casey’s vehicle, Kozloff ruled.
Widow of Bryan Casey embraced Casey's father in courtroom. LeeEllen Carroll hugged supporters outside of court. #ottnews
— Andrew Seymour (@andrew_seymour) May 29, 2015
The conviction is likely to result in prison for Christy Natsis. That's the going rate for impaired driving causing death. #ottnews
— Andrew Seymour (@andrew_seymour) May 29, 2015
The driving was a danger to the public and was to blame for causing Casey’s death, the judge said.
Immediately following the verdict, Casey’s widow, LeeEllen Carroll, hugged her husband’s father in the front row of the courtroom.
The guilty verdicts marked the end of a marathon trial that began in November 2012 and stretched over 55 days.
Natsis’s highly skilled legal team of Michael Edelson, Vince Clifford and Solomon Friedman did their best throughout to batter the credibility and reliability of the more than two dozen Crown witnesses. They also succeeded in having the most damning evidence the Crown possessed against Natsis tossed out.
Breath readings that showed Natsis had a blood-alcohol level nearly 2 1/2 times the legal limit to drive were thrown out after the judge decided that OPP lead investigator Const. Ryan Besner violated Natsis’s right to speak with a lawyer by repeatedly interrupting — and eventually hanging up on — a 40-minute call to her lawyer made from a windowless hospital bathroom in Arnprior.
Besner explained during the trial that he believed he was getting “jerked around” by Natsis, who was lying on the floor of the bathroom with her feet up on the toilet by the time he ended the call. Witnesses at the crash scene along with an emergency room doctor who treated Natsis for an abrasion on her knee said she smelled of alcohol.
One paramedic testified that the smell of alcohol on Natsis was so strong that he turned on the ambulance’s ventilation fans.
That same paramedic testified that Casey’s injuries were so grave that he floored his ambulance — racing at speeds of up to 160 km/h, even though Ottawa paramedic policy says they shouldn’t go faster than 140 km/h — in order to get the dying man to hospital in Ottawa quicker.
Casey, 50, suffered a broken femur, hip and pelvis and was bleeding to death internally when he went into cardiac arrest in the ambulance. Blood samples from Casey later showed that he too had a blood-alcohol level that was 1 1/2 times the legal limit to drive.
One of the Crown’s first witnesses testified that Casey pleaded with her for help when she came upon him trapped in his pickup truck.
Bryan Casey, 50, died March 31, 2011 after a two-vehicle crash on Highway 17 near Arnprior. Christy Natsis has been charged with drunk driving causing death and dangerous driving causing death.
The defence spent a considerable portion of their attack focused on the quality of the OPP investigation and their collision investigators. The defence alleged the testimony of collision investigator Const. Shawn Kelly revealed him to be a “biased, incompetent, incredible and unreliable investigator” and suggested little weight should be put on his analysis of the crash scene.
The judge agreed, to an extent, by refusing to accept portions of Kelly’s testimony as expert evidence in a mid-trial ruling, finding that the veteran police officer was biased and withheld evidence favourable to Natsis from her defence lawyers.
Crown prosecutors called evidence which they argued showed that the crash happened in Casey’s lane. The Crown also relied on data recorded by computer modules that record speed and other data from within both Natsis’s and Casey’s respective vehicles that they argue show Casey slowed and pulled to the right while Natsis kept a steady speed and didn’t brake in the moments before the crash.
In their lengthy 619-page closing submissions, Natsis’s defence lawyers argued that a large portion of the Ford’s data was corrupted and lost. It was also done by engineers who had never performed the task before.
The OPP report into the collision was also rife with errors and inconsistencies, the defence contended. Indeed, the collision investigator Kelly admitted in court he confused perhaps the most critical finding of his report. Kelly had mistakenly written the crash occurred in Natsis’s westbound lane, when he meant to conclude that it occurred in Casey’s eastbound lane.
aseymour@ottawacitizen.com
Twitter.com/andrew_seymour
查看原文...
