WAWA, Ont. — Ontario's Special Investigations Unit has decided that criminal charges are not merited for an OPP officer whose speeding vehicle struck and injured a snowmobiler.
The incident occurred in April 2019 in Wawa.
According to the SIU report on the incident, a 63-year-old man suffered multiple leg fractures when his snowmobile was broadsided by the OPP cruiser whose driver was responding to a report of a theft in town.
The officer had been driving at over 140 kilometres an hour on Highway 101 en route to the call, in a 90 kilometres an hour zone.
At the entrance to Wawa, where the speed limit changes to 50 kilometres an hour, he was still driving at 137 kilometres an hour.
Five seconds before impact, his speed was 116 kilometres an hour but it decreased to 71 kilometres an hour at the point of impact.
The collision occurred as the snowmobiler was crossing the road. He was in a group that had come off Wawa Lake, and had stopped at the highway before crossing.
The officer, who was negotiating a rightward bend in the road, was unable to avoid a collision when he came upon the machine in the act of crossing the highway.
On impact, the operator of the snowmobile was thrown from the machine and landed on the roadway.
SIU investigators considered whether the officer might be charged with dangerous driving causing bodily harm.
SIU Director Joseph Martino said the officer's speed while responding to the low-priority call "constituted a risk to traffic around him" and "was the pivotal factor in the collision."
Martino said the danger was aggravated by the officer's failure to activate his emergency lights or siren.
"He ought to have known, particularly as he crossed into the 50 kilometres an hour zone, that traffic around him would have little time to react to his cruiser given how fast he was going," he said.
Martino added "it is difficult to countenance the persistent of the subject officer's excessive speed to get to the scene of what was, after all a property offence."
However, the SIU also found there were mitigating circumstances.
"The fact remains that he was engaged in the execution of his duty and therefore exempt from the speed limits of the Highway Traffic Act...It is important to recognize that he was a police officer responding to the scene of a reported crime," the report states.
It notes, as well, that most of the stretch of highway he travelled on was rural in nature, and that the speed limit dropped to 50 kilometres an hour about 450 metres from the collision scene.
"In the circumstances, while I am unable to characterize [the nature of his] transgressions as fleeting or momentary, it was relatively short-lived – about half a kilometre and some 13 seconds," Martino said.
He pointed to other possible contributors to the collision, including high snowbanks on the highway shoulder, trees and shrubs on both sides of the snowmobile trail, and a "no parking" sign that may have impacted sightlines for the snowmobiler or for the officer.
Martino concluded "while one may legitimately criticize the officer for the manner in which he operated his police cruiser" in the moments before the collision, "I am unable to reasonably conclude that the officer's conduct was so substandard as to amount to a marked deviation from a reasonable level of care."
