Impaired driving trial in London.

What Paul Kay could remember about the collision was a loud bang and a white flash before he went unconscious.

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He and his wife Penny, 68, from Sparta, were on their way to shop at Princess Auto in London on Oct. 7, 2019. They were driving north on Highbury Avenue when a southbound Hyundai Sonata came over the centre line and crashed into them in the northbound shoulder where the Kays had tried to avoid disaster.

Paul Kay testified at the trial of Shawn Norris, 61, that he came to when a police officer was banging on the window of his Ford Escape and asking if he was injured.

His wife was in the passenger seat. "I looked at my wife. I wanted to see if her chest was rising or falling. It wasn't," Kay said during his testimony in a London courtroom.

He said he put his finger under her nose to see if he could feel any cool air. He couldn't. "I figured she had passed," he said.

Norris has pleaded not guilty to both dangerous driving causing death and bodily harm and impaired by drug while driving causing death and bodily harm.

The trial began Monday before Superior Court Justice Patricia Moore, with the Crown indicating it wants to prove Norris was impaired by prescription drugs when he veered across the solid centre line on Highbury Avenue near Scotland Drive and plowed into the Kays’ SUV more than three years ago.

The court also saw a video taken by a dash cam of a Chatham-Kent trucker travelling behind the Kays that showed the entire crash unfolding in seconds.

The Crown's first witness was Norris's former live-in girlfriend, Christine Flint, a double-amputee who testified seated in her wheelchair where she described how Norris routinely used her powerful painkillers – Percocet and oxycodone – and would sometimes refill her prescriptions without her knowledge.

"He used my medications like they were his," she said, when the couple was still together and living in St. Thomas.

Flint testified she didn't think she and Norris would have gotten together if she hadn't been on the drugs. She added that they "had good times together" when Norris was taking the drugs.

Flint said the night before the crash, Norris had fallen down the stairs in their home and broke his recent knee replacement. She went upstairs to bed, while he stayed downstairs and stayed in his easy chair.

She said she knew he was taking her pain medication and anti-anxiety mediation and saw him. His plan was to go to London to fill his methadone prescription and she was upset about him driving.

"You could tell he was in a lot of pain," Flint said and confirmed she saw him with her prescription bottles and take some pills.

She said he left and "I don't really talk to him before he goes to London." The next time she saw him was when he was in hospital in London after the crash. He was later transferred to St. Thomas Elgin General Hospital.

The relationship was over by January 2020 and Flint said she moved to Brampton and now lives in Mississauga. She maintained contact with Norris by text message right up until last Friday. Their conversations would sometimes touch on the crash.

Norris told her, she said, he didn't remember anything, and "he's afraid to go to jail."

Flint said she spoke to the London police two weeks ago and gave a statement because of "the fact that my medication likely caused somebody their life."

Defence lawyer Robert Farrington reviewed Flint's criminal record, dating back to 1983, that includes several convictions for fraud of more than $5,000 and forged documents. Her last convictions in 2010 netted her five years in prison. She also agreed, from time to time, she had sold her prescription medications.

No one talked to Flint following the crash. The investigating officer in the case, Const. Ben Hush, testified in the days following the collision, he was told Flint had died. When he interviewed Norris at the St. Thomas hospital, "I did offer him my condolences," he said.

When Flint reached out to the Crown's office last month, "I was shocked," Hush said. He said he interviewed Flint on May 26.

London firefighter Scott Beattie told the court about how Norris had to be cut out of his car and that Norris, who's left leg was heavily bandaged, was "very lethargic" and "groggy." He said he saw a bag full of prescription medications on the floor of the car.

Hush was more specific about the medications. There were a total of 11 pill bottles. Nine of them were labelled for Norris and were methadone, but two bottles had an assortment of pills of different colours in each of them. One of the pill bottles had Flint's name on it and originally was a prescription for Lorazepam, an anti-anxiety medication.

The court also heard from Mark Frederick, who described seeing a car heading south on Highbury Avenue between Commissioners Road and Bradley Avenue, where Highbury is a wide four-lane road with a wide grass median, shortly before the crash. The car left the road and skidded sideways into the centre median, kicking up grass and mud into the northbound lanes.

Frederick was a passenger in the vehicle and a work colleague was driving. He said the car stopped for no more than five seconds, then headed back to join the southbound traffic.

"For me, it was like something out of a movie," Frederick said. "It didn't make sense."

Later, when he heard about the serious crash on Highbury Avenue, not far from when he had seen the car leave the road, Frederick called the police.

Hush testified when he arrived at the fatal crash scene, the tires on the Sonata were muddy and there was vegetation and yellow flowers jammed into the front grill. He looked for where the car might have picked up the debris, but there was no connection to the crash scene, or anywhere on Highbury south of Highway 401.

After Frederick called the police, Hush said he was able to find an area on Highbury between Commissioners and Bradley where there were distinctive car tracks into the grassy median that stopped at the northbound west shoulder. A second set of tracks led back to the southbound lanes.

In the ditch were yellow flowers similar to what was found in the grill of Norris's car.

Doug Taylor, a transport truck driver from Chatham-Kent, also testified. His dashcam footage was shown to the court.

Taylor said he could see the car in the southbound lanes cross into oncoming traffic. He and the SUV in front of him slowed down and the SUV moved to the shoulder to get out of the way. The grey-coloured sedan went all the way across the northbound lane and head-on into the SUV on the shoulder.

Taylor said he pulled over, put on his four-way flashers, grabbed his safety vest and went toward the crash. Other witnesses said the situation was under control, so he left. He later supplied the camera footage to the police.

The crash, as Kay said. "happened instantaneously."

Kay told the court he suffered a shoulder injury, a broken sternum and eight broken ribs. His most severe injury was caused by the seatbelt cutting into his internal organs and breaking his back.

"It hurts every day and limits what I can do," he said to questions by assistant Crown attorney Heather Donkers, adding that he was a big man who used to have a lot of physical strength.

"I now get my 14-year-old granddaughter to lift things for me."

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