7 Feb 2009
The Windsor Star
BY SARAH SACHELI STAR JUSTICE REPORTER
Drunk driver gets 2 years in crash that killed daughter
The day his daughter died began like any other for Jim Ondejko.
Jessica finished in the bathroom as Jim’s feet hit the floor. They passed in the hallway. “We exchanged our usual ‘Hi’ and ‘Bye.’” Jessica left for work first. As Jim drove along Highway 20, he noticed a roadblock ahead. He turned on the radio to hear that a small black car had been in a crash. Pieces of it were strewn everywhere.
Didn’t connect.
Jessica drove a Saturn Ion — black. Jim didn’t make the connection.
He went about his business, meeting with a client, listening for radio updates about the crash that had disrupted his commute. Then his cellphone rang. The call came from his home, but the voice was unfamiliar. It was a chaplain. “My stomach felt like I’d swallowed a cannonball.”
Jim’s 22-year-old daughter died that day at the hands of a man who had spent the night drinking beer and snorting cocaine.
Scott Renaud, the grown son of an Amherstburg councillor, had driven head-on into Jessica’s car, breaking nearly every bone in the young woman’s body.
Jim Ondejko hasn’t turned on his car radio since.
Parole in 6 months
Renaud, 34, was sentenced Friday to two years in prison for impaired driving causing death. The sentence will have Renaud released on day parole in six months.
For Jim Ondejko and his wife, Nancy, their two surviving daughters and the more than 100 friends and family members who came to court Friday to support them, no sentence could ever be enough.
“God gave man free will and one man made a series of bad choices,” Jim said reading a prepared statement in court. “Because of his choices … our family has been handed a life sentence.”
Ironically, the Ondejko family wanted to keep Renaud out of the prison system where offenders like him are normally sent. They wanted him to be sentenced to the county jail. In an idiosyncrasy of the criminal justice system, a shorter sentence in jail can keep offenders behind bars for more time than longer sentences in a federal penitentiary.
Assistant Crown attorney Walter Costa implored Ontario court Justice Micheline Rawlins to sentence Renaud to two years less a day. That length of sentence would be served in the county jail and would keep Renaud behind bars for eight months — one-third of his sentence.
A sentence of two years places Renaud in the federal prison system, which would see him released on day parole after six months.
“I ask you not to send him to a federal penitentiary, but to the jail system,” said Costa, explaining the Ondejko family deserved some retribution for their daughter’s death. “I appreciate it may seem absurd that I’m standing here asking for less than the defence is asking for … but this individual deserves to be in a cell for as much time as possible.”
Rawlins did not agree. A federal penitentiary is where “like-minded individuals” are housed. “That’s where I think he should be.”
Rawlins gave Renaud credit for pleading guilty, saving the Ondejkos from having to relive their loss at a preliminary hearing and trial.
“I have been on the bench for 17 years and I know,” said Rawlins. “It’s like having a wound someone keeps cutting open again and again.”
But the Ondejkos disagreed. “I want the judge to know that just because he did not bring this to trial does not mean we do not relive those events every day of our lives,” said Jim. “We go through the same amount of pain, the same torture, day in, day out.”
His grief was so great that Jim had to take a medical leave from work. He has no benefits, so he and his wife are living off savings.
Nancy Ondejko said she can’t sleep and can’t find the words to describe “unbearable pain” she feels every day. “What does a mother say when she loses her precious baby? … On May 8, 2008 my life crumbled. Now my world is a pile of rubble.”
Derek Bischoff was planning a life together with Jessica, the woman he called his “one.”
Reading his victim impact statement in court Friday, he began with that old adage “You don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone.”
Said Bischoff, “I knew what I had in Jess.”
The two worked together at Aerotech Automotive, a job-placement firm for engineers and designers. Jessica landed the job as a recruiter soon after graduating from the University of Windsor, where she’d put herself though school working at Pizza Hut. Jessica’s boss called Bischoff when Jessica didn’t show up for work.
Bischoff called home in a panic, asking his parents to track down the Ondejkos, a couple his parents had yet to meet. “We met for the first time in the hospital over Jessica’s still beautiful, but broken body,” said Peter Bischoff.
Speaking of the pain he sees each day in his son, he told the court, “there can be no forgiveness for the perpetrator.” The courts, he added, “is a legal system, not a justice system.”
Jessica’s eldest sister, Jackie Werstein, is a nurse at Hotel-Dieu, the hospital where Jessica was pronounced dead. It’s the place she stood over her sister’s body, laid out on a stretcher, illogically expecting to see her baby sister’s chest rise and fall. She held her sister’s lifeless hand and picked pieces of glass out of the fingers.
Jackie, pregnant with her second child, spoke of raising children in a world were people act with “complete disregard for others.”
“As parents we teach our children to make choices. For each choice there are consequences.”
Renaud sat motionless as Jessica’s family read victim impact statements in the packed courtroom. So many of Jessica’s friends and family turned out for the sentencing hearing, the proceeding had to be postponed for an hour while court staff located a bigger courtroom. The hearing was moved out of the Ontario court building and into Superior Court.
When the judge offered Renaud an opportunity to address the court, the man turned and faced the audience.
“It’s very hard for me to stand here to look at all of you,” he began. “There’s not a day that goes by that I don’t think of Jessica.… I ask God why he took Jessica’s life and not my own.”
Renaud, who had been free on bail, said he went Thursday to the cemetery where Jessica is buried and dug through the snow to find her gravestone. “I asked for her forgiveness.”
After his release from prison, Renaud will be on probation for three years, during which he must take counselling for substance abuse, abstain from alcohol and stay out of bars, liquor stores or any other place where the sale of alcohol is the primary business. He won’t be able to drive for five years and must submit a sample of his blood for the police DNA databank.
His lawyer, Brian Ducharme, said Renaud feels great remorse. “His life will never be the same.”
Killing Jessica Ondejko is Renaud’s second criminal conviction for drunk driving. He was convicted in 1996 of driving with more than the legal limit of alcohol in his bloodstream.
While his full criminal record wasn’t entered in court Friday, the prosecutor said he has other convictions too, including one earlier this week for criminal harassment.
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I have decided I never want to hear about the injustice of the death penalty in the US.
The inhumanity and barbarism of a system that does what the Canadian system did to this family. A Joke. A Crime in itself.
Canada
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