Repeat impaired driver gets 9-year sentence for crash that killed 2
The impaired driver in a 2023 collision in Ottawa's east end that left two people dead has been given a nine-year prison sentence, an Ottawa court heard Tuesday.
In May 2024, Shallen Mckay pleaded guilty to two charges of impaired driving causing death, and one charge each of driving while prohibited and taking a motor vehicle without consent.
The charges stemmed from a crash on Aug. 2, 2023, at the intersection of St. Laurent Boulevard and Montreal Road.
Taking into account the time she has already spent in jail since her arrest, Mckay has more than six years left to serve. The Crown had asked for a 12-year sentence and her defence had argued for five to seven years.
Mckay had a previous impaired driving conviction dating back to 2018. In that case, she was sentenced to 30 days in jail and probation, as well as a 12-month driving prohibition.
Way over speed limit
According to a statement of facts about the August 2023 collision, Mckay ran four red lights and was speeding between 155 and 162 km/h in a 50 km/h zone before the crash.
Her blood-alcohol concentration was nearly three times the legal limit.
Franck Ntwari, 41, and Innocent Muhoza, 44, died in the other vehicle. The two men were heading home after having dinner with friends before the collision occurred.
Mélanie Rubavu, Ntwari's mother, was recovering from surgery when she heard her son was gone, she previously told CBC.
"Six years, 20 years, a lifetime ... Franck is not going to come back. My son is gone. He's gone," Rubavu said of the sentence while speaking to CBC outside the courthouse on Tuesday.
Muhoza's widow was also present for the sentencing and said she didn't feel it was enough. "But on the other hand," she said in French, "we have to respect the Canadian justice system."
Justice Heather Perkins-McVey said she took a number of factors into account, including Mckay's previous conviction and her early guilty plea.
Friends of Ntwari and Muhoza who were in another car on the night of the crash tried to help them. Muhoza had been thrown from their vehicle while Ntwari remained trapped inside.
"The trauma of witnessing such horror cannot be understated," Perkins-McVey said while reading out her decision.
Mckay's lawyer Ron Guertin said Mckay is still in her 30s and has four children.
"Five years is lengthy," he said of the lower end of the sentence he had proposed. "Nine years is long. Very long."
But Mckay is happy with the effective sentence of six years, Guertin added.
"She'll be able to get treatment there, programs there, and she'll come out of the programs a new person," he said. "All in, it was fair."
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Yahoo
3 hours ago
- Yahoo
Keir Starmer to launch national inquiry into grooming gangs
Keir Starmer will launch a national inquiry into grooming gangs after receiving the recommendations of an independent report on the scandal. The prime minister said a new statutory inquiry was 'the right thing to do' based on the findings submitted by Louise Casey, who has carried out a months-long inquiry into the abuse of young girls. Speaking to reporters travelling with him to the G7 summit in Canada, Starmer said Casey recommended 'a national inquiry on the basis of what she has seen'. 'I have read every single word of her report and I am going to accept her recommendation. That is the right thing to do on the basis of what she has put in her audit,' he said. 'I shall now implement her recommendations.' Asked to set out a timeline for the inquiry, Starmer said: 'It will be statutory under the Inquiries Act. That will take a bit of time to sort out exactly how that works, and we will set that out in an orderly way.' Starmer has previously resisted pressure for a new national inquiry into grooming gangs, and said earlier this year it would delay justice for victims. He called for ministers to instead focus on implementing the recommendations of previous reviews. Casey was asked to carry out a three-month national review on the scale and extent of grooming gangs in January after producing a report into sexual abuse in Rotherham. She was tasked with examining data not available to the initial national inquiry led by Alexis Jay, and to look into the ethnicity and demographics of abusers and victims, as well as 'the cultural and societal drivers for this type of offending, including among different ethnic groups'. Starmer said on Saturday that Casey's 'position when she started the audit was that there was not a real need for a national inquiry', but that she had changed her mind after reviewing the evidence. In parallel to Casey's review, the government asked Tom Crowther KC, who led an investigation in Telford, to help devise a model for a series of similar investigations in five towns where girls were abused, including Oldham. Ministers came under pressure over grooming gangs last year after Elon Musk spotlighted the government's decision to refuse Oldham council's request for a second national inquiry. The US billionaire's flurry of tweets on the subject brought the scandal back into public consciousness. On Friday, seven men who groomed two vulnerable teenage girls in Rochdale were found guilty of multiple sex offences after a long-running trial. The court heard the men subjected the girls to years of misery and expected them to have sex with them 'whenever and wherever they wanted'. Casey's 2015 review into the scandal in Rotherham said there had been an 'archaic culture of sexism, bullying and discomfort around race', with councillors and staff fearing being labelled racist if they mentioned the ethnicity of perpetrators. In response to the announcement of a new national inquiry, Kemi Badenoch, the Conservative party leader, said: 'Keir Starmer doesn't know what he thinks unless an official report has told him so … I've been repeatedly calling for a full national inquiry since January. It's about time he recognised he made a mistake and apologise for six wasted months.'
Yahoo
3 hours ago
- Yahoo
Keir Starmer makes U-turn mid-air over grooming gangs inquiry
The news emerged in a notably low-key way: a speculative question to Keir Starmer during his Q&A with reporters on the way to the G7 summit in Canada. Yes, he said, speaking carefully while wedged in the aisle of the cramped jet, there would be a full statutory inquiry into grooming gangs. This was, it should be remembered, not just one of the most toxic debates in British politics during 2025, but one where Starmer and his ministers had continually pushed back against demands for such an action. So why now? At first sight this might seem similar to the recent U-turn over eligibility for pensioners' winter fuel allowance – a belated acknowledgment that the original decision had been mistaken, masked by words about circumstances changing. But in this instance things are arguably more nuanced, despite the notably furious reactions from Kemi Badenoch and the shadow home secretary, Chris Philp, who were swift to accuse the prime minister of delay without reason. It is worth remembering that the scandal and the official response to it is not a new issue, and that demands for a new inquiry coincided squarely with Elon Musk, the billionaire X owner, taking a sudden interest in the subject. By the time Musk started posting furiously and often misleadingly about the subject, leaning heavily into the ideas of the British far right anti-Islam agitator Tommy Robinson, ministers were still pondering how to implement the recommendations of an existing inquiry completed by Prof Alexis Jay in 2022. The government found itself buffeted by a suddenly brutal media and political landscape, punctuated by grim vignettes like Musk calling Jess Phillips, the safeguarding minister who has perhaps done more to combat violence against women than any other serving Westminster MP, a 'rape genocide apologist'. The Conservatives and Reform UK then demanded a fuller national investigation into the phenomenon of the sexual abuse gangs that sprung up around the night-time economies of a series of towns, with many of the offenders being of Pakistani heritage. No 10's initial instinct was to hunker down and argue that the best action was to act on Jay's recommendations. But within a few weeks this began to shift and the government announced that the crossbench peer and safeguarding expert Louise Casey would conduct a review of the grooming gang evidence based on smaller local inquiries, without the statutory abilities to compel witnesses to give evidence. Casey has now completed her review and, as Starmer set out on the plane, recommended a full national inquiry, which will be set up. So this is perhaps less a U-turn than the consequences of January's earlier U-turn, and in truth given Casey had called for a national inquiry, it would have been extremely difficult for the government to push back against this. This will not, however, completely quell the political anger over the subject. The formal Home Office announcement of the inquiry implicitly acknowledges this, also setting out plans for the National Crime Agency to work with local police forces to try to prosecute grooming gang cases that happened years ago. Some critics of Starmer, Philp among them, also remain angry that, as they claim, he described supporters of a new inquiry as 'far right' when the PM hit out against Musk in January. This is an over-interpretation of Starmer's actual comments, who went no further than saying they were 'amplifying' some far-right demands. But, as shown by the court verdict last week in which seven men who groomed two vulnerable teenage girls in Rochdale from 2001 and 2006 were belatedly convicted, this is not an issue that is about to go away. The hope must be that, at the very least, the new inquiry helps replace some of the invective with facts.
Yahoo
7 hours ago
- Yahoo
Repeat impaired driver gets 9-year sentence for crash that killed 2
The impaired driver in a 2023 collision in Ottawa's east end that left two people dead has been given a nine-year prison sentence, an Ottawa court heard Tuesday. In May 2024, Shallen Mckay pleaded guilty to two charges of impaired driving causing death, and one charge each of driving while prohibited and taking a motor vehicle without consent. The charges stemmed from a crash on Aug. 2, 2023, at the intersection of St. Laurent Boulevard and Montreal Road. Taking into account the time she has already spent in jail since her arrest, Mckay has more than six years left to serve. The Crown had asked for a 12-year sentence and her defence had argued for five to seven years. Mckay had a previous impaired driving conviction dating back to 2018. In that case, she was sentenced to 30 days in jail and probation, as well as a 12-month driving prohibition. Way over speed limit According to a statement of facts about the August 2023 collision, Mckay ran four red lights and was speeding between 155 and 162 km/h in a 50 km/h zone before the crash. Her blood-alcohol concentration was nearly three times the legal limit. Franck Ntwari, 41, and Innocent Muhoza, 44, died in the other vehicle. The two men were heading home after having dinner with friends before the collision occurred. Mélanie Rubavu, Ntwari's mother, was recovering from surgery when she heard her son was gone, she previously told CBC. "Six years, 20 years, a lifetime ... Franck is not going to come back. My son is gone. He's gone," Rubavu said of the sentence while speaking to CBC outside the courthouse on Tuesday. Muhoza's widow was also present for the sentencing and said she didn't feel it was enough. "But on the other hand," she said in French, "we have to respect the Canadian justice system." Justice Heather Perkins-McVey said she took a number of factors into account, including Mckay's previous conviction and her early guilty plea. Friends of Ntwari and Muhoza who were in another car on the night of the crash tried to help them. Muhoza had been thrown from their vehicle while Ntwari remained trapped inside. "The trauma of witnessing such horror cannot be understated," Perkins-McVey said while reading out her decision. Mckay's lawyer Ron Guertin said Mckay is still in her 30s and has four children. "Five years is lengthy," he said of the lower end of the sentence he had proposed. "Nine years is long. Very long." But Mckay is happy with the effective sentence of six years, Guertin added. "She'll be able to get treatment there, programs there, and she'll come out of the programs a new person," he said. "All in, it was fair."
