The driver who fled as a girl lay dying
Jose Castro, 25, returned to face justice after the Star found him in Portugal
Kara Parman lay dying in the road.
The 7-year-old Toronto girl was crossing the street to buy some candy when she was struck by a car. The driver sped off. It was Nov. 22, 1993.
Kara, a Grade 3 student, died after lingering in a coma for five days. Police set up a special squad and launched a massive dragnet to catch the driver.
I was searching for him, too. I worked day and night, following a tip that he might have been a Portuguese immigrant. I knocked on doors across Toronto’s Portuguese community: body shops, cafés, neighbourhood parties. Like the police, I was coming up with nothing. The trail went cold for more than a year.
Thanks to a source, I ended up checking out a tip on Rogers Rd., just a few blocks from the collision site.
One of dozens of people I had canvassed thought the driver might have rented a basement apartment there. They knew him as Jose Fernandes.
The landlady was stunned when I said her quiet, hard-working tenant might be the hit-and-run driver police had been seeking for more than a year. She knew him as Jose Castro.
She recalled an agitated Castro arriving home one day, saying his father had suffered a stroke and he had to leave for Portugal immediately. He asked if he could store his car in their garage. A month later, he called, saying he was not coming back, and she was free to sell off his belongings.
Afriend came by to pick up his car, a 1985 Volkswagen Jetta, and the television. When a yard sale failed to move the microwave stand Castro had recently purchased, his Portuguese landlady kept it for herself. Feeling she owed him for it, she had visited him while on vacation in Portugal and paid him $50. He was living in a medieval town in the northern hills. She drew me a map on a napkin.
Don’t bother asking for the names he used in Canada, she said. Nobody would know him by Jose Castro or Jose Fernandes. Ask instead for his father, “Jose the tractor man.” I was on a plane the next day. After getting lost in the hills and being given directions by a prostitute, I was knocking on the door of a centuries-old house. Jose the Tractor Man answered, showing no ill effects of a supposed stroke. Neither he nor his wife was aware of the real reason their son had returned.
After initially denying any involvement, Castro broke down and con- fessed: He had been grocery shopping and was heading north on Dufferin St. At the lights near Hope Ave., he saw a little blond girl dash across the street. He tried to avoid her, he said. He panicked and fled the scene.
Two days after Kara died, the 25year-old who had worked illegally in Canada for five years as a security guard and cleaner flew home.
I knew the consequences of the story I just heard. As I prepared to leave, I offered the young man some advice.
“You can stay in Portugal and nobody can touch you. Portugal does not extradite its nationals. But I’m writing the story, and from this moment on, you will be a fugitive for the rest of your life. Is that the life you want?”
Two weeks later, I got a call from his mother. Her son wanted to turn himself in, but was scared. She asked me to extend her condolences to Kara’s mother. “As a mother I feel her pain. My son will do the right thing.”
I went back to Portugal and accompanied Jose Fernandes Castro to Canada. When we arrived at Pearson airport on March 2, 1995, two RCMP officers came aboard and arrested him. He was carrying a letter from his priest and another from his mother to Kara’s mom.
Castro, sentenced to a year in jail, was released after eight months and immediately deported to Portugal.
The story garnered international headlines and praise from my employer, colleagues, the police and Kara’s mother, Karen, who went on radio and television to thank me for bringing closure to her nightmare.
But some in the Portuguese community felt the story portrayed them in a bad light, that I was airing family laundry in public. Castro came back because he was a decent person who made a horrible mistake. By running, he turned an accident into a crime.
When I found him, he was a deeply wounded man, depressed and haunted by what he had done. By finding him, I gave him the opportunity to do the right thing.
Every so often I toy with the idea of trying to find out what happened to him. Did he marry? Did he have kids of his own? How did things turn out for him after he went back? Someday, I might just try to find out.