Tears were shed and sadness and anger expressed during a sentencing hearing Thursday for a man who has pleaded guilty to charges from a 2016 crash that led to the death of a friend and serious injuries to two others.
Crown prosecution is seeking between three to three-and-a-half years in jail followed by a four-year driving prohibition for Dustin Allen Tisdale, 24, while defence counsel argued for 18 months to two years in jail and a two-and-a-half-year driving prohibition to start from the date of sentencing.
Devin Hawley-Barks, 21, was killed in the March 12, 2016 early-morning crash on Highway 97 between Handlen Road and Austin Road. The force of the rollover threw Barks, Sara Willsie and Alyssa Tylee out of Tisdale's pickup truck. A RCMP traffic reconstructionist estimated he was going at least 165 km/h when he lost control and flipped while chasing another pickup.
Given a chance to speak to the court about the loss, Hawley-Barks' devastated father, Lawrence, was able to make it only part-way through reading his victim impact statement to the court before breaking into tears and then making a angry outburst as he returned to his seat in the gallery.
"I just want to hurt that boy," he said as he pointed at Tisdale, who spent the hearing looking straight ahead as he sat behind his lawyer and kept his distance from friends and family of the victims when those who packed the gallery for the hearing filed out of the courtroom.
In a statement read into the court record, Hawley-Barks' mother, Connie Hawley, said she is unable to drive by the scene of the wreck without breaking into tears and described her son as someone who was "so full of life and so full of dreams."
Willsie suffered serious spinal injuries and spent four months in Vancouver recovering. While her physical health has improved, she is still unable to work and is just getting by, she said in her victim impact statement.
Neither Tylee nor a fourth person in the truck, Riley Sindia, provided victim impact statements but both also suffered significant injuries.
According to an agreed statement of facts, in the hours leading up to the incident, Tisdale had been party-hopping and drinking with friends after leaving his truck at the Austin Road East Tim Hortons. By about 12:30 a.m., he was back at the restaurant when he came across Cody Furnell and three others in another pickup truck.
There were also eight or nine wooden pallets in the box of Furnell's vehicle. With Hawley-Barks and Willsie with him, Tisdale pulled his pickup alongside and with permission of one of the people in Furnell's truck, Hawley-Barks and Tisdale transferred the pallets over to his truck.
But in an apparent fallout from a minor altercation the weekend before, the some of the people in each truck started yelling at each other. To avoid making matters worse, Furnell drove out of the parking lot while Tylee and another person, Riley Sindia hopped into Tisdale's truck.
Tisdale was behind the wheel while Hawley-Barks sat in the front passenger seat and Sindia sat behind Tisdale. Because there was a child seat in the middle of the back seat, Willsie and Tylee share the rear passenger side seat.
Initially, Tisdale did not know where Furnell had gone and had no intention of finding him. Furnell had turned north onto a frontage road but as he stopped at traffic light at the intersection of Highway 97 and Weisbrod-Handlen Roads, he saw Tisdale driving at a fast rate and catching up to him.
Furnell turned left onto the highway without signaling and took off with Tisdale in pursuit. The driver of another pickup told police he had been going at 90 km/h when the two passed him "like he was standing still," the court was told.
The two had switched to the left lane to pass the vehicle. Furnell returned to the right lane as did Tisdale, but only part way and then he veered back into the left lane as if to pass Furnell. The driver of the truck the two had just passed said he then saw a cloud of dust and then Tisdale's truck fishtale, hit a concrete meridian and then begin to roll before coming to a rest upside down in a ditch just before Austin Road.
Just prior to the collision, Sindia advised everyone to put their seatbelts on but Tylee and Willsie were unable to do so and Hawley-Barks remained unstrapped and all three were ejected from the truck. From the time they left the Tim Hortons to when Tisdale went off the road, about four minutes had passed, the court was told.
Tisdale was able to reach the speeds he did because after-market parts had been installed to increase the truck's power, Crown prosecutor Kiel Swaby noted. He also noted there were more passengers in the cab than the truck could accommodate and that the pallets were not tied down.
Defence counsel Stanley Tessmer countered that Willsie told investigators it appeared Furnell had pulled in front of Tisdale and hit the brakes, forcing him to veer out of the way which led to him rolling the vehicle. As well, according to his client, Hawley-Barks who told him to follow Furnell, Tessmer added.
Swaby had acknowledged Furnell may have hit his brake pedal but contended the rollover would not have occurred had Tisdale decided not to chase him.
In October, Tisdale pleaded guilty to dangerous driving causing death in the case of Hawley-Barks and to two counts of dangerous driving causing bodily harm, all under the Criminal Code. The counts are reduced from the charges Tisdale had originally been facing of criminal negligence causing death and bodily harm under the Criminal Code.
While Tisdale had been drinking there was no evidence he was impaired, the court was told.
The father of two young children with a common law spouse, Tisdale is a heavy equipment operator at the Mount Milligan mine. A total of 14 letters of reference were submitted to the court on his behalf, in which he was described as giving, remorseful and a valuable worker.
Tisdale has seven driving violations to his name, including three for speeding, but the last was issued in November 2013.
"I think it's clear that this was an extremely out-of-character incident for my client," Tessmer said.
Provincial court judge Peter McDermick will issue a judgment on sentencing at a later date.
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