Family tells Natsis hearing of ‘dagger’ to their hearts
Setting up framed photos of her late husband and the children he left behind, LeeEllen Carroll had one message for Christy Natsis.
“You killed a human being,” she said, staring across a Pembroke courtroom Wednesday at the dentist convicted of drunk driving in the death of Bryan Casey on the Trans-Canada Highway near Arnprior on March 31, 2011.
Justice Neil Kozloff heard a second day of lawyer’s submissions and victim statements in a longrunning case.
It will finally come to a conclusion when Kozloff passes sentence on Natsis, 50, in Ottawa on Nov. 12.
Another came as Natsis herself addressed the court for the first time in the four-year proceeding.
“I am so deeply sorry,” she said in a weak, shaky voice, facing the judge with her back to the rest of the room.
The dentist said she is haunted every day by Carroll’s account of the pain that Casey’s death has inflicted on her, their three children and their extended family.
“I know my anguish and remorse pales in comparison to what the Casey family has to endure,” she said, promising that whatever happens to her, she intends to live the rest of her days with “more care, compassion, prudence and good judgment.”
The Crown attorney has asked Kozloff to send Natsis to penitentiary for six to eight years. Natsis’s lawyers have asked for a sentence of 3 ½ to four years.
Carroll told the court of her difficulty in breaking the news to her children, Gabriel, Regan and Muiredach, that their father wouldn’t be coming home. She spoke of the grief that flares without warning for the Ottawa family, such as the moment when a television character died and Muiredach began to weep. After hours of tears, the court heard, the child sat upright and cried, “Why did she have to kill Daddy?”
Carroll drew an audible reaction from some in the gallery when she suggested that Casey’s experience, knowledge and reflexes allowed him to take evasive action in the moments before the crash.
“As an engineer, he understood physics,” she read from prepared notes. “As an elite rugby player, he knew what happens when force meets force. So he did what he could. He hit the brakes and veered away.”
She looked up at Natsis, whose head was lowered through most of Carroll’s statement.
“Bryan Casey helped save your life,” she said flatly. “You’re welcome.”
Carroll spoke with strength and composure, pausing occasionally to collect her thoughts or wipe tears, her voice cracking only a few times. When she was finished, she and Justice Kozloff held each other’s gaze in silence for what felt like more than a minute.
Earlier, Bryan Casey’s father, Gus, told the court that when he heard of his son’s death, “the pain and the hurt were like a dagger to the heart.” The senior Casey read statements from Bryan’s brother, Brendan, who called Bryan “one of life’s good guys,” and from his sister and brother-in-law.
The day started with Crown attorney John Ramsay’s argument that Canada’s judicial system has been “loud and clear” about a need to increase sentences for impaired driving, which he likened to “a very drunk man walking down a crowded street firing a handgun at random.”
Ramsay told the court that many of the cases with four- or five-year sentences cited by defence lawyers Michael Edelson and Vincent Clifford involved mitigating factors not present in this case. And while pleading not guilty and going to trial, as Natsis did, is not in itself an aggravating factor in determining the sentence of an offender, entering a guilty plea to spare the victim’s family the added pain and hardship of a trial, he continued, would have been both a mitigating factor and a clear sign of remorse.
The other major part of what Ramsay called Natsis’s “fatal indifference” to the impact of alcohol on her life was her breach of a court order to not purchase, consume, or be found anywhere selling alcohol. Natsis was arrested in November 2011 after buying two 12-ounce bottles of vodka from an Ottawa LCBO.
All of these factors, the Crown concluded, amount to a need for an even stricter sentence than has traditionally been handed down in cases such as Natsis’s.