Teen pleads guilty in fatal crash in Vaughan
Speeding driver struck and killed kids, injured neighbour
The teenager who hit and killed two children after losing control of his father’s luxury car as it sped through a Vaughan neighbourhood has plead guilty.
The 16-year-old, from Richmond Hill, appeared in court via Zoom Wednesday to admit to two counts of dangerous driving causing death in the deaths of Anaya Chaudhari, 10, and her brother, Jax, 4, and dangerous driving causing bodily harm of their neighbour, John Chiarelli, 60, who was helping them fix a bike chain at the time.
The name of the teen is protected by law because he is a minor.
Crown lawyer Sean Doyle read out an agreed statement of facts after the guilty plea at Newmarket Courthouse.
It was around noon on May 16 that the teenager, driving a high-powered 2017 Mercedes-Benz, came to a full stop while on Athabasca Drive, in Vaughan, near Maple Downs Golf and Country Club, while on his way to visit his girlfriend, the court heard. Following his stop, from a vantage point where he could not see the children’s home, the youth began to speed, reaching102 km/h a half second before the vehicle struck the curb.
Analysis showed the brake pedal was never depressed.
A technical analysis by York Regional Police found that a car can travel no more than 82.7 to 83.9 km/h to successfully navigate the turn on Athabasca.
The sedan hit a curb and kept driving over front lawns before hitting a tree and hedge. Following this, the vehicle hit Anaya, Jax and Chiarelli, before hitting a retaining wall and electrical transformer box.
“None had time to take evasive action,” Doyle told the court.
Jax would die later that day and Anaya, the following day.
Chiarelli suffered a broken knee, resulting in the insertion of plates and screws. The knee continues to cause pain with each movement and may require replacement.
Getting out of the vehicle, the youth made a number of statements, the court heard.
Those include that the vehicle had “locked up” and he “couldn’t steer it,” then that he’d dropped his wallet and was “reaching for it” when he lost control, and finally that something was faulty with the vehicle’s brakes and that he “didn’t know what happened.”
An analysis of the car found that nothing was mechanically wrong with the vehicle.
Seth Weinstein, lawyer for the defence, made a brief statement in which he said the teen may have pressed the accelerator rather than the brake, accounting for the rise in speed shortly before striking the curb.
“There was no braking as the vehicle negotiated the curb,” Weinstein said. “One plausible explanation for what happened at that point was that rather than braking as he approached the curb, (he) accidentally pressed the accelerator and that’s why you didn’t see any braking in circumstances where, quite frankly, you’d expect to see braking.”
He added this was not a defence, as the boy was liable nonetheless, as he would have been in excess of the critical curb speed.
The court expects sentencing to occur in about eight weeks.