One of the witnesses to yesterday’s fatal crash on Highway 417 says the driver who drove the wrong way down the westbound lanes did not even try to swerve or avoid the vehicles he struck. Dean Brown, an Ottawa Senators hockey commentator, was in the third vehicle of a six vehicle chain reaction crash. He is quoted in the Ottawa Citizen as saying that the wrong way driver was not being chased by police at the moment of the crash and did not veer off his path one inch or try to miss anybody. The paper quotes both city and provincial police as saying that they were pursuing one of the vehicles as part of a sexual assault investigation. Ottawa Police received a call from a man reporting that his daughter had been sexually assaulted by a family friend at a Kanata hotel on Sunday morning. However, the man was gone before police arrived. It’s also alleged the suspect had threatened suicide. The SIU is investigating the crash that happened just before 1 pm near Panmure Road. The driver of the first vehicle, a 36 year old man, was killed, while the driver of the first car he hit, a 62 year old woman was also killed. Her two passengers, two men aged 27 and 28, suffered non life-threatening injuries. Several others were treated at the scene. The names of the dead have not been released. The S-I-U was called in to investigate due to the report of a police pursuit but police maintain that the chase was called off before the crash occured.
