Sims: Why oh why does Petronella McNorgan still want to drive?

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The reader’s email that landed in my inbox went right to the heart of what’s bothering a lot of us about the Petronella McNorgan case.

“Being a woman of 74 years, I cannot imagine ever wanting to drive again after killing a child. I know I would never be able to forgive myself, whether guilty or innocent in a matter like this. The fact that McNorgan would even think of appealing says much,” the reader wrote.

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So it does.

Despite dodging a prison sentence for eight convictions for criminal negligence – one for the death of a precious eight-year-old girl and seven counts of bodily harm for the injuries sustained by others in the young Girl Guide unit that was run down by McNorgan’s SUV on Nov. 30, 2021 – McNorgan and her legal team plan to forge ahead with an appeal of her convictions and sentence.

Most people in the same legal jeopardy wouldn’t be allowed to go home and sleep in their own bed. A review of the case law that was presented to Superior Court Justice Pamela Hebner to help make her sentencing decision showed that it’s a rare day in court that someone convicted of so many bad driving counts under such tragic circumstances doesn’t end up incarcerated.

But I find no fault with Hebner’s decision to sentence McNorgan, 79, to two-years-less-a-day of house arrest and three years of probation. McNorgan has been a model citizen – a wife, a mom, a grandmother, a teacher and a mentor with a deep Catholic faith. She gets points for that. She’s also a diabetic breast cancer survivor and main caregiver for her ailing husband of six decades.

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“Ms. McNorgan has otherwise been a law-abiding productive member of the society. She has done many good things. But she has done this one horrific thing that cannot go unpunished,” the judge said at McNorgan’s sentencing this week.

Prison was an option, but sending a frail, elderly woman to jail, frankly, would have been cruel. As Hebner pointed out in her reasons, McNorgan is only a danger to the public if she’s allowed to drive. And the judge used every tool she had available to her to keep her off the roads, given the jury’s criminal negligence findings.

If the house arrest term started today, McNorgan wouldn’t be able to drive again until she’s 84. But her house arrest hasn’t started. McNorgan remains on bail pending her appeal to the Ontario Court of Appeal that will take months. The terms of that bail also include a driving prohibition.

Her defence lawyer says that there’s relief, but overall, McNorgan isn’t very happy about this.

“She would prefer to be acquitted and be able to drive because she thinks she should be able to drive,” defence lawyer Phillip Millar said candidly after McNorgan’s sentencing.

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It’s a theme that has run through the case ever since McNorgan was charged. She’s convinced she has done nothing wrong.

She believes in her guts that despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, she did not mix up the gas pedal and the brake pedal when her 2017 Honda CRV blasted through the red light at Wonderland Road and Riverside Drive, hit a Jeep, a light standard, a small tree and all those little girls walking on the sidewalk on the way to a nearby park.

Even though five experts at her trial testified the SUV was in good working order, the brake pedal wasn’t touched and the gas pedal was to the floor, McNorgan has never wavered that it was the vehicle, not the driver, that caused the tragedy.

Hebner noted throughout her decision that McNorgan hadn’t accepted responsibility for what happened, especially during her comments to the traumatized families that “I would never intentionally hurt anyone and did my very best not to that night.”

“She expressed regret and remorse for the harm caused but does not comprehend that she was the cause of that harm,” Hebner said.

I can’t figure out whether McNorgan is just beyond stubborn or that deep down she knows it would crush her to admit that it was her fault. Either way, this is McNorgan’s version of “alternative facts,” where she only believes what she wants to believe.

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Millar said after the sentencing Tuesday that McNorgan has a “very stoic, I-will-not-lie” personality and “if she thinks she was pressing the brake, she is going to say she was pressing the brake until the day she dies.”

And that could be a problem for her going forward. Millar wants the appeals court to decide whether making a driving “error,” like continued pedal misapplication, constitutes criminal behaviour, adding: “If nobody had been killed, I don’t think there would be any charges.”

But I would suggest McNorgan has to admit she made the error before you can argue the point. But it appears she won’t.

What’s infuriating is that the McNorgan saga will drag on. Instead of a driving case that probably should have been resolved months ago in the Ontario Court of Justice, it’s run its course through the higher court to a jury and now off it goes to the appeals court.

And through all of this, the victims’ families, the Girl Guide leaders and the community has been dragged along with it. The frustration of the parents with children who are traumatized, some of them still dealing with physical and emotional injuries, was palpable in the courtroom.

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When McNorgan blew through that intersection, all the families were fundamentally changed. None moreso than one brave couple who told the court that they still read stories aloud at night in their daughter’s empty bedroom, who have nightmares where they can’t save their little girl and who will forever wonder what great things were in store for her.

Yet, McNorgan still wants to drive. Even if she is too stubborn to take full responsibility, I can’t understand why a 79-year-old woman wouldn’t willingly hand over her keys after a child is killed.

Just because you think you’re right doesn’t necessarily mean that you are.

jsims@postmedia.com

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