ST. THOMAS – A drunk driver who crashed onto a sidewalk here, killing an 11-year-old boy and injuring several others, was sentenced on Friday to six years in prison.
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About 50 people filled the gallery of an Elgin County Courthouse courtroom as Justice Glen Donald sentenced Nicholas Lemke, now 21, to six years in prison for killing 11-year-old Aiden Curtis and injuring four others, one of them critically, in the July 4, 2023, collision. Lemke also received a 10-year driving ban.
“(There) is no sentence that can undo your loss or restore your lives to the way they were before,” the judge said to the loved ones of the young boy, adding he doubted anyone in the courtroom would be “satisfied with the number of days in jail.”
That was clearly the case with Sarah Payne, Aiden Curtis’s mother. Speaking on the courthouse steps, she told reporters: “They should start with making (Lemke) an example. If they start giving life sentences, then people might stop drinking and driving.”
It was about 4:45 p.m. that summer’s day and Curtis was walking with friends and their family members after getting ice cream. Lemke’s pickup truck struck the group at the corner of Talbot and Inkerman streets in central St. Thomas. The boy was killed and four others were hurt.
Lemke’s sentence included five-and-a-half years for impaired driving causing death, six months to be served consecutively for impaired driving causing bodily harm and a 90-day sentence for a second count of impaired driving causing bodily harm to be served concurrently.
In his remarks, the judge noted several mitigating factors in the ruling, including Lemke’s young age, his status as a first-time offender, mental health issues and his guilty plea. But Donald also cited aggravating factors such as the amount of alcohol in his system (0.14 blood-alcohol reading, nearly double the legal 0.08 limit) and the fact he was driving drunk at a time of day when more people are out in public.
The sentence is on the low end of what the Crown sought, six to eight years in prison for impaired driving causing death and two to three years and six months on the impaired driving causing bodily harm counts, respectively.
Defence lawyer Keli Mersereau was seeking a sentence of three years behind bars. As she exited the courthouse, Mersereau said she felt the sentence was too harsh. “It’s not the sentence that I would have wanted for my client . . . six years, it’s not what I expected.”
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