‘It’s hard to think about it every day’

Guilty texter’s fatal mistake left a family without a father

WINNIPEG • Vann Ray Hansell was driving his Toyota pickup truck after a late shift at work and a beer.

For much of the drive, his iPhone 4 was in his hand. In the span of 44 minutes, he typed and sent 12 text messages and read seven.

The last message the 19-yearold received was especially long: “It was so cold! Hahaha at least it was nice to get out of the city. Got drunk and just had fun and drove to kenora twice.”

It would have taken Hansell about seven seconds to read the message. Driving near the speed limit, he would have travelled 136 metres before the crash.

Hansell says he never saw the sign warning of a construction site, nor the flashing lights of the flagmen in orange vests and hats. He doesn’t even recall looking up.

But those who reconstructed the crash say he swerved hard to the left without touching his brakes and collided head-on with a Dodge Neon.

“The car looked like it did two 360s,” crew chief Robert Crawford later told Winnipeg police.

Crawford ran to the car and saw a man hanging out of the driver’s-side window, taking long breaths.

That man’s name was Mark Derry, and Hansell had just killed him.

The crash — on Sept. 7, 2011 — would shatter the life of Cheryl Derry and the family she had formed with a man she met 25 years earlier, when she was a nurse and he was in nursing school.

Cheryl says she was initially touched by Mark’s kindness in the face of his mental illness, later diagnosed as schizophrenia.

“Mark was probably one of the most caring people that I ever knew,” she said. “If a friend called and needed something, it didn’t matter what we were doing, he was taking off and going to do it.”

Schizophrenia sidelined his hopes of a nursing career, so Mark became a trucker. He and Cheryl had twins, Sara and Jonathan, their son born with cerebral palsy that resulted in one leg being shorter than the other.

Mark had a special bond with his son. By age 14, Jonathan was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. Mark blamed himself, initially, but through sport, the two would both find themselves. Jonathan cofounded Sledge Hockey Manitoba.

“My dad was basically my biggest fan,” Jonathan, a goalie, recalled. “He was able to experience being a proud hockey parent and seeing me excel.”

On Sept. 6, 2011, after dinner with his family, Mark left for work. Driving east on Dugald Road in his Dodge Neon, Mark approached a city construction crew as flagmen waved traffic through one direction at a time. The Neon was the last eastbound vehicle to be waved through, while a line of westbound cars waited their turn.

Hansell was coming from the opposite direction in his Toyota pickup truck, his iPhone in his hand. Experts say he swerved and crashed head-on into the Neon.

After the two vehicles collided, both flipped, with the pickup ending up on its side, and Hansell climbing out the window.

“All (Hansell) wanted to do was try to help the guy in the Neon,” a city worker told police later. “The only thing he said was that it was his fault, that he was texting.” The memory haunts Hansell. “It’s not easy, to be honest, it’s not something you want to think about,” he said. “My dad is a retired firefighter. All the time, he taught us first aid, CPR, how to dress a wound, so I think my reaction was little bit because of that.”

The police came to take Cheryl to the hospital, while Jonathan tried to reach his twin sister.

In the cruiser, Cheryl struggled to compose herself.

“I kept asking (about Mark) and they said ‘Sorry, we don’t know that information.’ The nursing brain went into effect and I (thought), ‘this is not good because there were no sirens but the lights were flashing,’” she said.

At the hospital, a doctor insisted on speaking to Cheryl before she saw her husband. Mark was already brain-dead, his body badly mangled from the impact. An autopsy would later find tears in his liver, bruises to his lungs and fractures to his ribs and ankles.

By the time Jonathan and Sara arrived, hospital staff had wiped away the blood from Mark’s body. Before staff removed him from life support, Jonathan said goodbye. “(I told him that) I loved him and that I was going to try to make the national team in sledge hockey.”

The next couple of months were hellish for Jonathan. He stopped seeing friends, stopped going to hockey. “I just wanted things to go back to the way they were.”

Unable to bury the pain, Jonathan tried to kill himself. What saved him was sledge hockey.

“Hockey became a refuge for me, a place where I didn’t have to worry about what was going on outside the rink, what was going on back home, and what was going on in the media.”

Jonathan would go on to be selected by Hockey Canada to be a goalie on its development team, one level below the national team. He moved to Mississauga and got a job at a sporting goods retailer.

When Cheryl first saw Hansell in a Winnipeg courtroom, she expected to feel anger, but she wasn’t prepared for a wave of empathy.

“He’s just a young, scared kid and it was like, ‘You’re going to pay for this for the rest of your life, one way or the other, whatever happens in court,’” she said.

“(He) seemed to be genuinely upset about the fact that he had caused a death and there was a little tiny part of me that almost felt sorry for him. We live with the loss, but he has to live with what he did. He has to live with the guilt he took a life through his own stupidity.”

The remorse that Cheryl senses is real, Hansell said. “With my crime, you have to think about (Mark Derry’s) family, his worth, the community. It’s hard to think about it every day.”

When Jonathan spoke in court before the sentencing of Hansell, he said his father would not have wanted him to be consumed by hate, but the judge mistook his words for forgiveness.

“We didn’t and still don’t,” Jonathan said. Asked what he’d say to Hansell now, Jonathan was blunt: “For that (moment) you took your eyes off the road, you changed more than just your life, you changed my entire family’s life … Was it worth picking up the phone and texting?”

HE HAS TO LIVE WITH THE GUILT HE TOOK A LIFE THROUGH HIS OWN STUPIDITY