‘IT DOESN’T CHANGE A THING FOR ME’
Marco Muzzo, who drove drunk in 2015 and killed three children and their grandfather, was denied parole Wednesday. The panel felt Muzzo had not dealt with his substance abuse problem.
The man who killed her children and father in a drunk driving crash may have been denied release from prison Wednesday, but for Jennifer Neville-Lake, her own life sentence continues without the possibility of a reprieve.
“I don’t and won’t get parole from this life sentence of misery and despair,” Neville-Lake said in an emotional statement to a two-member parole board panel, from whom killer drunk driver Marco Muzzo was requesting his release on day parole.
After deliberating for about 20 minutes, the panel came back and denied both day and full parole.
“You sabotaged your progress you may have otherwise made by underestimating your problem with substance misuse, if not abuse,” board member Kevin Corcoran told Muzzo, 32, in a packed hearing room at Beaver Creek prison.
“We don’t question your remorse,” Corcoran said, adding Muzzo would need to pursue counselling in prison, especially regarding substance abuse. He can reapply for parole in a year and has two months to decide whether he wants to appeal Wednesday’s decision.
“Before we can grant you parole, we need to have confidence that you will not be a risk to yourself and the community,” Corcoran said.
Afull parole decision from the board will be released within two weeks.
Muzzo was sentenced to 10 years in prison in March 2016 after pleading guilty to several counts of impaired driving causing death for the crash that killed Daniel Neville-Lake, 9, Harrison, 5, Milagros, 2, and their 65-year-old grandfather Gary Neville. The crash also seriously injured the children’s great-grandmother and grandmother, who was driving the minivan carrying the family when Muzzo blew through a stop sign.
Court heard after his guilty plea that Muzzo had nearly three times the legal limit of alcohol in his system at the time of the crash in September 2015 in Vaughan, having just arrived back from his bachelor party in Miami on a private plane.
The case attracted widespread attention due to the young age of many of the victims and the Muzzo family’s enormous wealth — estimated at $1.8 billion, according to Canadian Business magazine.
It was both an emotional and tense morning at the parole hearing Wednesday, as the children’s parents and aunt spoke of their deep sense of loss, while the parole board vigorously questioned Muzzo on whether he did indeed have an addiction issue and was properly addressing it.
“I firmly believe I’m not an addict,” Muzzo told the parole board, saying he believes he has only ever been really drunk nine to 10 times in his life.
While in prison, he has been employed, has no history of violence, attended a few Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, gets spiritual counselling at chapel and has been granted escorted temporary absences to work in the community, including volunteering at a children’s camp.
That last revelation led Neville-Lake, who was sitting directly behind Muzzo, to briefly leave the room. She had previously told the board she could not bring herself to write Muzzo’s name in her statement, as “the sight of it is beyond sickening to me and remains a psychological trigger.”
Muzzo’s parole officer, Lynn Dubciak, told the board that Muzzo did not meet the criteria for substance-abuse treatment in prison. She said Muzzo’s case management team supported his release to a halfway house on day parole and eventually his release on full parole.
Muzzo said that he wanted to become an “advocate” if released, hoping to raise awareness around the dangers of drinking and driving — a message that had clearly escaped him, the judge at his sentencing said in her ruling.
“From the get-go, I knew exactly what I had done,” Muzzo told the board, at times getting emotional. “Spending more time in here, I don’t think will contribute to me learning anything that I haven’t already learned.”
The board had concerns that Muzzo was downplaying his history with alcohol. Corcoran raised an incident involving Muzzo in 2012, in which he and a friend were denied entry to a Vaughan strip club for being too intoxicated. They began fighting with the bouncers and threatening their lives. When the police came to take Muzzo to the station to sober up, he tried to kick the windows out while sitting in the back seat.
He ended up being ticketed for being drunk in public, a noncriminal offence.
Muzzo did not tell the psychiatrist evaluating him ahead of his 2016 sentencing about the incident, and claimed Wednesday that he only remembered it when his case management team told him about it once he was in prison.
“This speaks to a history” around alcohol misuse, said Corcoran, who contended Muzzo did remember the 2012 incident but didn’t want anyone to find out. This also spoke to a lack of transparency, Corcoran later said.
The board was also concerned with the number of speeding tickets Muzzo received between 2008 and 2015 and the fact that, in many of the instances, police reduced the fines and he received no demerit points on his licence.
Earlier Wednesday, the family of Muzzo’s victims vehemently urged the board not to release him. Edward Lake, the children’s father, demanded that a photo of his children and father-in-law be placed in Muzzo’s cell, “so he can see daily what he destroyed.”
“Whether or not he’s on day or full parole, it doesn’t change what I go home to every night, it doesn’t change how I live, it doesn’t change anything around me,” Jennifer NevilleLake told reporters.
“So it doesn’t matter. If he gets parole — there’s no more of my family left to kill, no more children who will be riding in grandparents’ car anymore.”