Hit and run cost woman her leg
She remembers everything.
Brittany Warwick was on the back of her fiancé’s Harley-davidson motorcycle leaving a friend’s place in West Chezzetcook last fall when a man driving a Toyota Yaris on Highway 207 changed their lives forever.
“We were going to my grandmother’s house to drop off her birthday present,” Warwick said in a recent interview.
“We were coming around an S-turn and this guy came fully into our lane and hit us, basically going right down the left side of the bike.”
Warwick, 23, thinks the car’s fender caught her leg as it went past, “and basically ripped me off the bike.”
‘OVER HIS WINDSHIELD’
Anthony Walsh, her 37-yearold fiancé, “went up and over his windshield” in the Sept. 3, 2023, crash that happened just around sunset.
“We were spread pretty far apart,” Warwick said, noting they landed about six metres from each other.
“I landed face-down, but my left leg was as if I was lying on my back,” she said.
Warwick managed to flip over onto her back.
“I was just screaming for help because we were on a not very busy road, so I was like, ‘Oh gosh, when is someone going to come help?’ I was in so much shock that I didn’t even know what had happened.”
‘I WAS BLEEDING OUT’
Friends the couple had just left at a gathering on Johnson Avenue heard the crash and came running.
“I was bleeding out on the side of the road,” Warwick said. “I was very close to death. It was very scary. But I managed to stay calm at the time, which is crazy.”
A driver who didn’t see the crash told investigators a silver four-doored car passed her heading toward Lawrencetown with its “driver’s side completely smashed in,” RCMP Const. Filip Kedzierski said in a warrant application in the case.
SHUNNED POLICE
Police put out a message to be on the lookout for the car, Kedzierski said, noting they also tried to canvass the area for witnesses “but very little information from the group of bikers was given as they didn’t want anything to do with police.”
Warwick knows bikers at the crash scene didn’t want to speak with police.
“But I did because I was so badly injured that I didn’t care who I talked to,” she said.
A woman on the scene who was apprehensive about talking to police told investigators the bikers had left from a home in West Chezzetcook, Kedzierski said. “She stated that a silver vehicle had struck the motorcycle driven by Walsh.”
INDUCED COMA
Warwick’s left leg was badly damaged.
“I had broken my femur, my pelvis was shattered, my left hip was broken and the artery in my left leg was torn out of it,” she said.
Paramedics took her in an ambulance to Twin Oaks Memorial Hospital in Musquodoboit Harbour.
“From there, I was Lifeflighted to the QE II. And then as soon as I got to the hospital, I was basically put in for a 12hour surgery, and after that I was put in an induced coma to keep me from moving and make sure that I was stable.”
That lasted about five days. “Roughly a week after the accident was when they decided that they needed to amputate my leg.”
Surgeons spoke to her about the operation, which cut off her left leg above the knee.
“It was kind of the only option at that point in time,” Warwick said. “The bone in my leg was so dead that there was no saving it.”
WORKING TOWARD WALKING
At the Nova Scotia Rehabilitation Centre, she tried using a temporary artificial leg.
“It’s basically like a balloon thing that you can put your limb in, and it imitates a prosthetic,” Warwick said. “That was pretty neat.”
The former competitive gymnast has been working on herself since leaving the Rehab to go home to Enfield.
“They gave me a bunch of different exercises and stretches to do to keep my limb moving. There was a lot of nerve damage in my leg all along the left side. So, I don’t have a whole lot of feeling in my limb yet. But hopefully, it comes back, when I do get my prosthetic.”
A car saleswoman by occupation, Warwick will find out in late April if she’s eligible for a prosthetic.
“I sell cars, so I do a lot of walking in the run of a day at work,” Warwick said. “That’s my biggest goal is to be able to get back to work and be able to live my life the best that I can.”
‘DOING PRETTY WELL’
Walsh was also injured in the crash, but not as badly as Warwick. He suffered a broken leg, shattered ankle and foot.
“I definitely took the brunt of the impact,” she said.
“He’s doing pretty well. He’s walking with a cane. And he’s got some metal, and screws and rods in his leg, but he is totally starting to be able to walk a little bit normal.”
Almost two hours after the crash that cost Warwick her leg, the Yaris driver, who’d driven away after the impact, picked up the phone and turned himself in.
“Dispatch advised that the male caller sounded elderly or intoxicated and wanted to speak to police about the accident,” Kedzierski said, noting investigators went to the man’s Highway 207 home in West Chezzetcook and spoke with him.
A Toyota Yaris sat in his driveway.
“The vehicle had significant driver’s side damage,” Kedzierski said.
‘MUCH MORE DAMAGE THAN HE THOUGHT’
When police interviewed John Walter Mannette, 61, it didn’t sound like he knew what had happened.
He told investigators he was driving when “something hit the side of his car but was unsure what it was,” Kedzierski wrote in information to obtain a warrant filed at Dartmouth provincial court.
“He noticed that his side mirror was gone but continued home. Once he arrived home, he noticed that there was much more damage than he thought.”
Mannette had bloodshot eyes and gave off a strong scent of alcohol, Kedzierski said.
‘DRINKING BEER’
He failed a breathalyzer and police arrested him, taking him to the Cole Harbour RCMP detachment for more testing.
“Mannette disclosed that he had been drinking beer during the day and his last drink was four to five hours from the breath demand,” Kedzierski said.
Both of his official breath samples were more than twice the legal limit for driving, according to the investigator.
Kedzierski convinced a justice of the peace to grant a search warrant to go through the Yaris, looking for evidence to back up his working theory that Mannette caused the crash.
EVENT DATA RECORDER
Particularly, he was keen on probing the car’s event data recorder located within the airbag control module, which might have “created an event” when it allegedly hit the Harley, even though the car’s airbags did not go off.
Investigators also seized paint chips from the damaged Harley and took swabs of blood from the bike to compare with evidence found on the Yaris.
Warwick doesn’t know what she’d say to the driver who hit them.
“If I saw him in person, I would just be at a complete loss for words,” she said.
But she wants him to know he’s altered her life forever.
“My life will never be the same,” Warwick said.
RAISING AWARENESS
While she was still in hospital, Warwick decided she wanted to create more public awareness about the dangers of drinking and driving.
“Nowadays there are so many different kinds of taxi services that there should never be a reason to ever get behind the wheel drunk.”
To that end, Warwick designed shirts, hoodies and stickers to sell, bearing the motto: Everyone against drunk driving.
Her plan is to sell them and donate some of the money to different organizations, including the Bikers Down Society, a not-for-profit group that assisted her and Walsh financially after they were injured.
‘THEY HELPED US’
“They helped us out when we were down, so I wanted to be able to give back to them and show them that we appreciate everything that they’ve done for us,” she said.
“They came out to our house, and they were chatting with us for quite a few hours,” she said. “They were able to give us a donation to basically survive. Because neither of us are working right now.”
Monnette is scheduled to appear in Dartmouth provincial court Feb. 26 to answer to charges of impaired driving causing bodily harm.
“I hope that he goes to jail to learn his lesson,” Warwick said.
But she knows he has three impaired driving convictions from 1991, 1994 and 2004. He also has convictions for driving while his licence was revoked and suspended, according to investigators.
“It might make a difference,” Warwick said. “It might not.”