Volunteer firefighter not guilty in hit and run case

55-year-old cyclist left paralyzed

On a bright, sunny morning in July 2016, volunteer firefighter Jeremy Janzen drove down a rural Niagara-on-the-Lake street on his way to work.

About 6:40 a.m., he heard a loud bang, but did not stop.

The noise he heard was in fact his truck striking cyclist Daniel Millar.

The victim landed in a rocky ditch where he lied for an hour before being discovered by a farmer. His injuries were catastrophic. The 55-year-old, who was training for a triathlon, is now paralyzed from the waist down. He will never walk again.

Janzen, a resident of Niagaraon-the-Lake, was charged with failing to remain at the scene of an accident causing bodily harm.

At a nine-day trial held earlier this year in Superior Court of Justice in St. Catharines, defence lawyer V.J. Singh said his client admitted to causing the collision but maintained he didn’t know he had struck a person.

At a judgment hearing Thursday, Judge Meredith Donohue said Janzen’s testimony raised a reasonable doubt on the issue of his knowledge of the collision.

“On a review of the evidence as a whole, I am not satisfied Mr. Janzen knew he had been involved in an accident with a person until an hour later,” the judge said before finding the 32-year-old not guilty of the criminal offence.

After hearing the noise, Janzen testified at trial, he looked in his rear view mirror and saw a small round object rolling across the road. What he thought was a piece of his truck was actually a bicycle gear.

When he arrived at work, he checked his vehicle and realized the truck had sustained significant damage to its front end. There was no blood on the vehicle.

Janzen said he had been to several accidents involving motor vehicles and pedestrians in the past as a volunteer firefighter and said “there would have been blood everywhere” if he had hit a person.

Soon after, his firefighter pager went off. Firefighters were being called to the same road he had just been on in response to a critically injured cyclist in a ditch.

Janzen testified his “stomach sank” after hearing the page.

He returned to the scene on Carlton Street near Townline Road and was arrested later that day.

Janzen testified he would have stopped and rendered assistance if he had known he had struck someone.

“I just wish I would have seen it,” he said. “I would have gladly stopped to help. It’s what I do.”

Assistant Crown attorney Greg Smith had argued Janzen knew full well he’d struck Millar. He contends the driver panicked and left the cyclist clinging to life in a ditch.

The judge disagreed, saying this was not a case of “wilful blindness.”