It all started so innocently and it all ended so tragically. An accident that left a woman dead and her passenger injured closed down Highway 407 for more than five hours on Tuesday. And it's all due to a tragic set of unique circumstances and some potentially questionable driving.
The mishap began with a totally unrelated incident. A driver was heading down the
toll highway near the 427 when some ice came off a passing truck and smashed his windshield. The stunned motorist pulled off to the side and several tow trucks followed to offer assistance.
And that's when a black BMW came out of nowhere. Witnesses say it appeared to be going too fast for the conditions and it clipped one of the tow trucks, became airborne, hit another car, then flipped over onto its roof on the highway.
It happened quickly and one of the truckers, Allen McConnell, rushed to the rescue. He's been trained in these kinds of emergencies, and tried to do what he could. "I had kicked the back window in of the vehicle," he recalls. "I climbed inside the vehicle to assess the situation ... I observed that one passenger was shook up, but not overly hurt. I freed her from her seat belt ... had her removed from the vehicle."
But he had a much more grim assessment of the 26-year-old Brampton woman behind the wheel. "I checked for a pulse. Started first-aid on the lady. The pulse was very shallow. By the time the paramedics and the fire department showed up, the lady had lost her pulse, and ended up dying in my arms." Cops raced the victim to hospital, where she was pronounced dead.
As terrible as it was, it could have been much worse. The woman's passenger was asleep and police credit her survival to the fact she didn't tense up when the accident took place. And the flying car barely missed another tow truck driver who watched the vehicle - and his life - flash before his eyes.
"We just walked away and the BMW hit the tow truck behind us, ended up flying over the top of my truck, just missing us," Gus Vitrano relates. "It was 70 feet in the air. If I was there five seconds earlier, the car would have hit me probably right in the head."
Police confirm both trucks were off to the side of the road and that the car swerved into them. "We are never safe," Vitrano complains. "People don't pay attention. We're never safe."
The OPP is still exploring the cause but now say they don't believe weather was a factor. They point to driver inattention, a momentary lapse that may have cost the woman her life.
It was the first fatal accident on the 407 in more than two years. The highway finally reopened around 3:30pm.