Witness disputes police findings
An expert defence witness told a trial Tuesday there is “no way to determine” whether an accused Impala driver is to blame for a deadly collision with a Blazer in 2014 after the two vehicles were spotted racing down Lauzon Road and side-swiping each other at speeds of more than 100 km/h.
The Blazer, driven by Calvin Crosby, then 22, skidded off the road near Tranby Avenue shortly before 3 a.m. on April 4, 2014, slamming into a light pole before overturning. Passenger Katie Robson, 20, was killed after being flung from and trapped under the vehicle.
Earlier in the trial of Kyle Matthew Colthurst, charged with dangerous driving causing death and fleeing the scene, a Windsor Police Service crash reconstruction specialist testified it was Colthurst, 31, who drove his Impala into the Blazer, triggering the fatal crash.
But a former Windsor police officer who now works as a private paralegal and accident reconstruction expert for hire was brought in by the defence Tuesday to dispute those findings.
“I totally disagree,” Wally Martin testified under questioning by lawyer Brian Dube. Martin said the evidence wasn’t there to support the prosecution’s position that the front driver’s side of Colthurst’s Impala struck the rear passenger side of the Blazer, causing it to skid out of control and leave the road.
Martin said that, based on his reading of the evidence, if the occupants had been “properly buckled up, the Blazer crash was very survivable.”
There were four occupants in the Blazer, all friends and co-workers at a nearby Tim Hortons who had met at a downtown nightclub earlier that evening. Another female passenger who was injured would spend nine months in a wheelchair.
With much of Martin’s testimony couched in such technical terms as “critical curb speed” and “coefficient of friction,” assistant Crown attorney Tim Kavanagh asked Superior Court Justice Scott Campbell for time to consult the prosecution’s traffic experts before starting his cross-examination of the witness.
Before being recognized by the court as an “expert in accident reconstruction” for the current trial, however, Martin had to defend his record and his past.
Martin was the subject of a fouryear legal dispute and forced to leave the Windsor Police Service for taking bogus sick leave while feigning back pain. Martin resigned in 2010 after being found guilty of deceit and neglect of duty in a Police Act hearing in 2008.
Martin agreed with Kavanagh’s suggestion he’d had “an acrimonious relationship” with the Windsor Police Service. Asked whether he still harboured resentment or animosity toward his former employer, Martin answered, “No ... I’ve moved on.”
Martin said he has never attended a crash scene to conduct a reconstruction but that he had worked on a number of such cases, prepared several reports and previously testified twice in court as an expert. Kavanagh said the Crown would accept Martin as an expert witness but reserve the right to question the reliability of his evidence.
Meanwhile, down the hall at Windsor’s Superior Court building, Calvin Crosby, now 25, took
Katie (Robson) was under my truck, and we needed help.
the witness stand at a voir dire hearing before a judge ahead of his own trial.
“Katie was under my truck, and we needed help,” Crosby testified, explaining how he called 911 in the moments after he crawled out a window of his overturned truck. He wouldn’t learn of Robson’s death until later when he was in a police holding cell after a brief hospitalization and then his arrest.
The defence is challenging the constitutionality of how police attained breath and blood samples from Crosby on the night of the crash, showing he was impaired. Crosby said he was “in a state that I was blacking out” while talking to police that night, but assistant Crown attorney Brian Manarin got him to remember some things, including telling the 911 operator that “someone hit and run me.”
Both Crosby and Colthurst face a number of charges, including dangerous driving causing death, and both men are expected to testify at each other’s trial.
It was just a month ago that a mistrial was declared in the Colthurst case after the Superior Court judge set to preside discovered he had once acted against Martin when the latter was a police officer and the judge was still a lawyer.