Another Abbreviated Life

Six grief counsellors have been deployed to spend the day at Brockville Collegiate Institute in Brockville, Ontario. At the very start of the new 2013-2014 school year. Who might have imagined, a week earlier, that one of their own would not be there to get on with his education, get on with his life, prepare for his future.

Aaron Stevenson (Submitted photo)

An inebriated driver. Not the first time. He is 23 years old at the present time, and back in October of 2009 he was convicted of impaired driving. Court records indicate that he was fined $1000 for that offence and banned for driving for a year. Unlikely that he obeyed the court order. There are others who are out driving around and still consuming alcohol before setting out for that drive, who are not caught. The law is a good thing they doubtless feel as long as it gives them wide berth to act as they feel entitled to.

The man in question, Joseph Greer, killed a 16-year old boy one half-hour into the new day of Sunday, after Saturday had fled into history. He was again driving while under the influence of alcohol. He is now accused of that very same offence again, along with hit-and-run charges. After striking sixteen-year-old Aaron Stevenson in the wee hours of Sunday morning, neither Joseph Greer nor his passenger Rusty Pearce thought to stick around.

What they did think to do was to move the broken, but still-living body of the boy to another location other than where they hit him with their vehicle. They decided, for whatever obscure reasoning they used, to move the boy's body from the crash site on County Road 2 near Irace Drive, Brockville, to the Brockville Rotary Park. They took no action to determine the extent of the boy's injuries, or to find medical help for him. They left him there to die, alone and vulnerable to his fate.

An autopsy concluded that the boy's injuries were consistent with his having been a victim of a motor-vehicle collision. A resident of the area nearby where the accident occurred said he had heard the deadly impact: "We had just got home and I heard a bang". He ventured outdoors and witnessed people searching the ditches and on lawns for the victim of a crash. Because there was hard evidence beside the sound heard by nearby residents; a shoe and a knapsack lay on the shoulder of the road.

It was to the park where first-responders, firemen and then paramedics were called with the discovery of the boy's body at the park. The Brockville Rotary Park is one of two locations in the town where skateboarders were most often seen. An old ice-hockey rink had been converted to a skateboard park in the summer months. Several days after the collision and death of 16-year-old Aaron Stevenson, his friends returned to school at Brockville Collegiate Institute. He was to have been among them.

Joseph Greer whose driving skills were challenged by his use of alcohol, and who struck the boy with his vehicle felt he had found a solution to his dilemma of not being caught out yet again breaking the law, and this time with utterly disastrous results. His passenger, 21-year-old Rusty Pearce, appears to have been cut from the same flawed cloth. In the summer of 2010 he had been sentenced to a month in jail for mischief and breaching conditions.

This time around both breached the universal law of the sanctity of human life. Joseph Greer charged with impaired driving with a blood-alcohol level over 80 milligrams. His friend Rusty Pearce charged with failing to remain at the scene of the accident. Both charged with performing an indignity to a dead body. As explained by OPP Sgt.Kristine Rae, the unusual "indignity" charge "is in relation to not providing or attempting to provide medical assistance to the victim."