Her parents were living the Canadian dream – arriving here from Portugal, they had scrimped and saved, worked hard and built a home and a beautiful family they loved.
The man who would destroy it all was Artur Kotula, a 38-year-old Burlington man who shouldn’t have been behind the wheel at all – three days earlier, an ER doctor at St. Joseph’s Hospital told him his driver’s licence was going to be suspended for the second time because of seizures caused by alcohol abuse disorder.
But on that October afternoon three years ago, he was speeding down Parkside Dr. in the city’s west end at more than twice the posted speed limit.
Valdemar Avila, 71, and his 69-year-old wife, Fatima, were on their way to Costco to pick up a prescription and were stopped in rush hour traffic near the intersection of Parkside and Spring Rd. when Kotula’s speeding grey BMW 320i suddenly slammed into the back of their red Toyota Matrix.
It set off a chain reaction of collisions involving five vehicles with the Avilas’ Toyota taking the brunt of the impact. Valdemar died at the scene of the horrific crash; Fatima died later in hospital.
“Artur has robbed me of peace and happiness,” their daughter Ashley Avila told the court Thursday, her sobs often threatening to overcome her. “My family’s days are filled with an emptiness that can’t be replaced. There are so many days that I just want to pick up the phone and call them.”
Following a judge-alone trial, Superior Court Justice Suhail Akhtar rejected Kotula’s testimony that he had blacked out and convicted him in November 2024 on two counts of dangerous driving causing death and two of causing bodily harm.
In the five seconds before the collision, court heard the BMW was travelling south on Parkside Dr. at a speed of 101 km/h to 124 km/h; the posted speed limit was 50 km/h. When it plowed into the back of the Toyota, it was estimated to be travelling at between 117/km/h to 101 km/h.
They didn’t stand a chance.
Neighbour Barry Carolan didn’t have to witness the crash to know he had to rush over to help.
“By the sounds that I heard and the plume of splintered glass and vapourized red paint, I knew it was bad,” he wrote in his victim impact statement.
He triaged the victims and gave CPR to Valdemar and is now consumed by nightmares of how it could have been even more tragic if pedestrians had been standing there that day. Bloody bodies and dismembered limbs fill his nights, “all because of the convicted person’s irresponsible and selfish actions on Oct. 12, 2021,” Carolan wrote.
“I think about the egregious actions of the convicted and wonder if another will wipe me out, right in front of my house. And leave my family without a husband and father.”
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Lauren Holfeuer narrowly missed being struck.
“If I had only been a few seconds slower, I would not be writing to you today. I would have died on Parkside along with Valdemar and Fatima,” she wrote.
She was walking home from High Park and had just crossed Spring Rd. when the explosive collision behind her propelled her forward. Holfeuer said she turned back to see one of the most horrible sights she’s ever witnessed – and now those images are forever seared in her brain.
She’d assumed Fatima was 90, not 69, when she first saw her.
“Her face was so hollow from being hit. Not hit, pulverized,” Holfeuer wrote.
Her mom is the same age, with the same colour hair, and her nightmares have now added her mother dying beside Fatima on the road, “all because some guy had to get on the Gardiner five minutes faster.”
In one of her most touching lines, the shattered witness expressed her apology to the Avila family.
“I was a coward. I wish I had talked to Fatima and held her hand,” Holfeuer wrote. “That is one of the biggest regrets of my life.”
But the real coward, of course, is the man who caused this carnage, and can listen to its impact without showing any emotion at all.
Kotula’s sentencing hearing continues next month.