After 26 years of accident-free driving under his belt, David Virgoe suddenly found himself barreling towards several immobile cars on Highway 400 last June. 

The vehicles belonged to three street racers who had lost control and crashed on the busy highway and Virgoe was forced to make a crucial decision.  He could keep going and crash into them, risking their lives, or he could swerve his big rig off the road and put his own life in jeopardy. 

He chose the latter and was killed after his truck overturned in a ditch. 

Virgoe was a father or three.

On Tuesday his family reacted with shock when a judge handed one of the men involved in the racing a slap on the wrist.

Twenty-year-old Nauman Nusrat received a 2-year-conditional sentence to be served at home and a lifetime ban on driving.

Virgoe's widowed wife Debbie stood outside the courthouse holding a photo of her deceased husband. 

" He died protecting people...and today they didn't protect us. They didn't protect us from those people. Today they let those people back out on the highways."

"That's what I have, that's what I get to go home to at night-time," she added, clutching the photo.  "And he doesn't talk back to me. I don't have anybody to tell me where to go or what to do or how to look after things. I don't have anybody to guide me anymore."

Virgoe's daugther Bobbi believes the sentence was an insult to her father's life, and his last heroic act.

"I remember asking that my dad not be forgotten and today he was forgotten and he died for nothing," she said before breaking down.  

Preliminary hearings for the two other men accused of racing are expected to begin in June.