Dangerous Driving Causing Death

Shouldn't people discipline themselves better? People who are educated, ostensibly responsible, business owners, professionals? Don't we, as a society, know how dangerous it is to drink and then get into a vehicle and drive? Don't we care that in doing so we present as a danger to the public? The answer to all those rhetorical questions is obvious, yet the carnage continues.

Fifty-year-old Bryan Casey, married for twenty years, the father of three young children, dead. Father of two boys, 7 and 11, and a daughter, 9 years old. Those children are now part of a single-parent family. They will have vivid, loving memories of a father they knew for too short a period of their lives. Their mother will now be forced to be father and mother to their three children.

Good thing they have a supportive and extended family, friends and colleagues. They will need them. But they are not a substitute for the father and the husband that they have lost through someone else's lack of conscience, someone's decision to drink alcohol and drive on a public road, becoming a mortal menace.

Mr. Casey was in his Dodge pickup truck on Highway 17 near Arnprior. He was on his way home for the week-end from his job as an engineer at a Siemens Canada project located in Chalk River. It was his usual practise, barring inclement weather, to head home every Thursday night. He would often arrive home before the children went to bed.

This Thursday he did not. It took Arnprior firefighters 20 minutes to remove Bryan Casey from his wrecked truck. Ottawa paramedics treated him for critical multi-system trauma. En route to The Ottawa Hospital's Civic campus trauma unit from the Arnprior & District Memorial Hospital, Mr. Casey went into cardiac arrest. The doctor accompanying him along with the paramedics was unable to revive him.

His truck had been hit by a westbound Ford Expedition SUV that crossed into his eastbound lane, colliding with him. The driver was a 46-year-old Pembroke woman who now faces three drunk driving-related charges. Her name is Christy Natsis and she sustained a minor leg injury. The charges levelled against her are impaired driving causing death, driving with over 80 mg of alcohol in her system, and dangerous driving causing death.

Ms. Christy is Dr. Christy Natsis who, with associates, operates a Pembroke dental practise.