Pedestrian killed in crash
Driver, 19, who stayed at North York scene, charged with impaired driving
A 19-year-old man has been arrested for impaired driving and dangerous driving after a pedestrian was struck and killed while walking on the sidewalk in North York early Monday morning
Toronto police were called to the area of Lawrence Avenue West and Varna Drive at 4:58 a.m. to respond to a pedestrian collision.
A trail of debris and tire tracks remained at the scene on Monday morning. Four police traffic cones marked a spot on the sidewalk, on the north side of Lawrence just east of Varna, where the driver appeared to have left the road before crashing into a large wooden sign and chain-link fence beside the intersection about 100 metres away.
Police tape, tied to an apartment building beside the street, was draped across the grass and a path of debris littered the grass alongside muddy tire tracks leading to the fence.
By 10:30 a.m., the car had been removed from the scene.
According to police, a black BMW M5 was headed west on Lawrence Avenue West when the driver lost control attempting to pass another vehicle.
The driver then mounted the curb and hit a 54-year-old man who was walking down the sidewalk on the north side of Lawrence. The pedestrian was taken to hospital, where he was pronounced dead.
The driver and three passengers were uninjured and stayed on the scene following the crash, police said.
Mario Perez, who is the superintendent and a longtime resident of the nearby apartment building, woke up to the crash, which he said sounded like a strong wind dragging plastic garbage bins.
Outside, he said he saw a man who looked to be injured on the ground, face down on the shoulder of the road. A few metres away, a darkcoloured BMW sedan had spun around and come to a stop against the broken fence.
He said he saw three younglooking people, two men and a woman, standing with police at the scene.
“It’s scary, I’m still shaking right now,” he said.
“Especially when I saw the human being (on the ground), I felt so sad.”
Neighbours say this is the second time in three months a car has gone off the road at this intersection, which is beside a school and just a few hundred metres from the onramp to the Allen Road expressway.
“It’s really dangerous,” Perez said adding that there have been a lot of close calls with cars nearly hitting pedestrians.
Nelly Gammang, a senior who has lived in the building for 13 years, says she was nearly hit by a car while walking through the intersection recently.
Lawrence Avenue is one of several long, wide arterial roads where injuries and fatal collisions have happened most often in recent years, according to the Star’s analysis of Toronto traffic collisions data from 2022. The data showed that the worst hot spots for traffic collisions include many intersections along major roads in the inner suburbs.
According to police, more than half of the 163 people killed on Toronto streets since 2021 are pedestrians.
“We have an overrepresentation of pedestrians being killed on our roads,” Const. Sean Shapiro of the Traffic Services unit told the Star.
Police have arrested 19-year-old Shengquan Wang. He is facing charges of impaired driving causing death; dangerous driving causing death; driving with a blood-alcohol content over 80 milligrams of alcohol for every 100 millilitres of blood; and driving as a novice driver with a blood-alcohol reading over zero.