No charges laid in man's death during 401 pileup
Ontario Provincial Police have completed their investigation into a string of collisions on a stretch of Highway 401 between Maitland and North Augusta one intensely snowy day last December that left a father of three pronounced dead at the scene and sent seven other people to hospital with minor injuries.
A 28-year-old from Brampton, Ont., and a 53-year-old from Pickering, Ont., have been charged criminally with dangerous operation of a motor vehicle, dangerous operation causing bodily harm and criminal negligence causing bodily harm, but not in connection to the fatality that day, an OPP news release said.
It was around 12:20 p.m. on Dec. 11, 2019, that officers responded to reports of multiple vehicle collisions on the westbound highway. There were seven collisions over six kilometres, damaging 25 commercial and 22 passenger vehicles, and leaving hundreds of people stuck in a traffic jam.
The sole fatality was 33-yearold Jack Moon, from Kingston. He, his pregnant partner, their three young children and Moon's mother had been left homeless by a house fire less than two weeks earlier, and he was driving back to Kingston from Ottawa after a fruitless attempt to replace his destroyed passport so his family could travel to Disneyland over the Christmas holidays.
The Moon family's back-toback tragedies pulled at the public's heartstrings and generated a massive outpouring of support. A GoFundMe campaign for his family, now closed, raised more than $300,000.
According to the news release, members of the Leeds County detachment of OPP were helped in the investigation by OPP technical collision investigators, a collision reconstructionist, the highway safety division and the crime unit.