Heart Rending Grief Fills Family Who Lost Son To Devastating High Speed Crash
Posted May 20, 2008 12:00 pm.
This article is more than 5 years old.
Vincent Fernando had seen the Victoria Day fireworks and told his father he just had to drop his friend off and then he was headed home.
It was a return the 17-year-old never made, instead becoming the lone fatal victim of a dramatic overnight crash in Markham that left three others injured.
Police say speed was a factor in the deadly incident, which happened on 9th Line near Delmark Blvd. Witnesses recalled seeing the vehicle, a Toyota minivan, careening along the stretch of road when the teenage driver apparently lost control.
The van rolled, smashing into utility poles, traffic lights and two trees before coming to a stop. Fernando was ejected and killed, while two of his passengers were seriously hurt and another suffered minor injuries.
The two critical survivors were loaded aboard an air ambulance and taken to Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre to be treated. The third surviving passenger wasn’t as seriously wounded and was transported by ground ambulance to hospital, but for Fernando there would be no such recovery. Tuesday afternoon his grief-stricken family tried to wrestle with the sudden loss.
“I have only one daughter … just one son,” said the teen’s father, Joseph Fernando dissolving into tears of heart rending grief.
Sister Christina was the first to hear the horrible news from police. “I asked him tell me he’s okay … they wouldn’t tell me he’s okay,” she cried. “I knew something went wrong.”
Officers at the scene tried to reconstruct the crash from the shell of a vehicle it was hard to imagine had once been a minivan.
“It was just before midnight, it was a Toyota Siena van that was northbound at a very high rate of speed,” confirmed York Regional Police Cst. Paul Diceman. “Close to 150 kilometres an hour.”
Police shut 9th Line between Highways 7 and 407 for 10 hours as officials restrung and replaced damaged hydro wires and traffic signals.
At the Fernando home, army gear was laid across the young man’s empty bed Tuesday. Vincent had just completed a co-op term with the Canadian Armed Forces.
“He wanted to go to Afghanistan to fight,” Christina Fernando recalled. “We were like, ‘no way you’re going you’re never going to come back.'”
A month from his high school graduation, he’d also recently received a letter of acceptance to a policing program at Humber College.
“He didn’t have a bad name or nothing,” Joseph Fernando sobbed. “He was a very good kid.”
