Crown rests case without calling lead investigator
Prosecutors not seeking further testimony in three-count trial of OC Transpo driver
Ottawa Crown attorneys prosecuting the rookie OC Transpo driver for the deadly 2019 Westboro Station crash rested their case on Friday without calling the lead investigator or the police reconstruction officers to the stand.
In fact, one of the Ottawa police reconstruction officers was on the original witness list but was removed by the Crown earlier this week.
Det. Alain Boucher, the lead investigator, was also not called as a Crown witness and was asked to leave the courtroom early on in the trial to protect the authenticity of his testimony should he be called to the stand later on.
Boucher was not only banned from the courtroom during testimony but also instructed not to follow it on Zoom.
Other senior Ottawa police officers from the reconstruction unit who Zoomed in right after their names were raised in testimony were also asked to get immediately off the online feed.
Crown attorneys made it clear, that, in their opinion, the case is not one anchored in reconstruction.
“To start, this is not a reconstruction case nor is it one that is particularly dependent on contentious expert evidence,” assistant Crown attorneys Dallas Mack and Louise Tansey replied in court filings to a defence application for more disclosure related to internal police emails.
While the Crown says it's not a reconstruction case, court has heard that in fact, Ottawa police spent so much time on its reconstruction report that it made at least 29 known drafts. And by the final version, original, key conclusions favourable to the bus driver, Aissatou Diallo, had been deleted — notably that the blinding sun and old, diverting construction lines may have been factors.
A central issue raised by defence lawyers is that Diallo has been subjected to a biased police investigation that excluded evidence favourable to the defence.
And while the assistant Crown attorneys say it's not a case dependent on contentious expert evidence, defence lawyers — Solomon Friedman and Fady Masnour — have a much different take on that and told court that they will call an expert as their first witness when they start their defence of Diallo.
Diallo, a 44-year-old single mom, is on trial for three counts of dangerous driving causing death and 35 counts of dangerous driving causing bodily harm.
Doomed double-decker, No. 8155, slammed into a steel bus shelter at Westboro Station at 3:50 p.m. on Jan. 1, 2019, a Friday afternoon. There were 85 passengers on the express Route 269 when it hit the steel shelter with a concrete foundation.
The crash claimed the lives of Anja Van Beek, 65, Judy Booth, 57, and Bruce Thomlinson, 56.
Tansey has told court that Diallo didn't wake up on Jan. 11, 2019, with malice in her heart, but she did abdicate her responsibility for 15 seconds when she let the bus drift across a lane, into a rock wall and then into the bus shelter.
After the crash, Diallo was co-operative when police arrived and they reported that her first concern was knowing whether anyone had died, court heard.
“She then began to ask me repeatedly if anyone had died. It was quite apparent that she was genuinely concerned for the passengers on the bus. She had tears streaming down her face and appeared helpless,” Ottawa police Const. Corey Bourguignon wrote in a report filed in court. Diallo was so co-operative that the officer — who wanted to spare her media attention — didn't cuff her, which is against the force's arrest policy.
Diallo was arrested and jailed at the police station before the police investigation had been fully launched. In fact, Diallo wasn't actually charged until seven months after she was arrested and jailed.
The judge-alone trial, with Ontario Court Justice Matthew Webber presiding, resumes next week.