Black ice is to blame for a fatal car crash three years ago, said a Nanaimo woman's lawyer on the final day of her trial.
Clare Bekkers is facing impaired and dangerous driving charges following a collision on the Island Highway near the Cassidy Inn Dec. 22, 2008 that killed her two sons and injured herself and her two daughters.
Crown and defence lawyers delivered their closing statements Tuesday. Judgment is scheduled for Friday March 30.
Defence lawyer Bert King said the accident was due to "a series of unfortunate events".
He said the facts do not point to either impaired or dangerous driving, but to Bekkers's car hitting an unexpected patch of black ice as she was making a lane change into the left hand lane while driving northbound on the highway, causing her vehicle to veer sharply to the left into southbound traffic.
"The only explanation is black ice," said King. "This was an accident. A pure accident."
The morning of the crash, King said Bekkers saw several people before she left Victoria to return home to Nanaimo and her father, her in-laws and a friend all testified that she appeared normal.
"They saw nothing that would indicate impairment from alcohol," he said. "They would not have let her drive."
A toxicologist found 42 milligrams of alcohol in 100 millilitres of blood – under the legal driving limit of 80 – in a blood sample taken from Bekkers at Nanaimo Regional General Hospital about an hour and a half after the accident.
She might have been over the legal limit when she left Victoria two hours before, King said, but the toxicologist, a Crown witness, estimated Bekkers would have been below 80 at the time of the crash.
He said there is no evidence that the anti-depressant or prior cocaine use – Bekkers testified she ingested cocaine two nights before the accident – had any effect on her driving.
As for dangerous driving, King said her driving in the minutes leading up to the crash indicates impatience – witnesses testified she was tailgating and switching lanes frequently while trying to pass cars driving side by side on the highway in front of her – but not dangerous driving.
Some drivers who testified at the trial said they were driving at normal highway speeds and not expecting ice, he added.
Crown lawyer Frank Dubenski said Bekkers was going too fast for winter road conditions and driving aggressively, citing testimony from drivers who Bekkers passed shortly before the crash.
"Her manner of driving was dangerous and a marked departure from everyone else who was driving in the northbound lane," said Dubenski. "No one else drove off the road that day in that fashion. If ice contributed, it only contributed because she was driving too fast.”
Some drivers were able to steer their vehicles to avoid colliding with the cars involved in the accident, he said.
Dubenski said the Crown believes her ability to assess risks and make split-second decisions was compromised by the residual alcohol and drugs in her system.
"Mrs. Bekkers chose to drive home," he said. "She wasn't feeling great. She knew that she was hung over. Driving in her physical condition was reckless."
The presence of ice is not an explanation from the Crown's perspective, said Dubenski, as a defence expert's theory that Bekkers's left front tire hit a patch of black ice and acted as a fulcrum point to propel the car counter-clockwise into oncoming traffic was rebutted by an expert witness engaged by the Crown.