Marco Muzzo is 29 years old, more than old enough to know that driving drunk is inexcusable and deadly. His blood-alcohol level was three times the legal limit when he killed three children and their grandfather on a Newmarket, Ont., road last September, after he plowed his jeep into their minivan in the middle of the afternoon.
Mr. Muzzo has pleaded guilty to four counts of impaired driving causing death as well as two counts of impaired driving causing bodily harm. The victims were Daniel Neville-Lake, 9, his siblings Harrison, 5, and Milagros (Millie), 2, and their grandfather, Gary Neville. Muzzo's sentencing is March 29; the Crown wants him to go to jail for 10 to 12 years, while the defence is arguing for eight.
A grown man who had already been legally reprimanded for being drunk in public (and received multiple speeding tickets, including one for driving 37 kilometres per hour over the limit) should have known that he'd had one, or seven drinks, too many. He should have figured out another way to get home.
This devastation is his fault, all his fault. And yet I've been wondering if anyone other than Mr. Muzzo could have stopped it.
The "bystander effect" is an idea that comes up often in discussions about school bullying and campus sexual assault. The idea is that onlookers can help reduce these events by stepping in when they see something disturbing; the debate is whether or not they have a responsibility to do so.
It's not a term that's used specifically by anti-drunk-driving advocates, but it's a common underlying message. The LCBO's "Deflate the Elephant" initiative puts the onus on hosts not to let intoxicated guests drive themselves home. On her gut-wrenching Facebook page, Jennifer Neville-Lake, the mother of Mr. Muzzo's victims, is using the hashtag #ImTHATperson to rightly point out that any awkwardness caused by objecting to drunk driving is less important than stopping it.
In other places, intervention is the law. In 2004, a French couple was charged with failing to prevent a crime when a guest left their home intoxicated and killed a family with his car. The couple argued that they did protest, but that the driver, Frederic Colin, became belligerent and insistent. Though they were eventually cleared of all charges, it's still technically illegal to let drunk people drive in France, and bar owners have been charged with the offence multiple times.
In Ontario, where Mr. Muzzo lives, no one but the driver is liable. Three years ago, a judge in Belleville decided not to charge two bar owners after one of their employees killed herself and another person after leaving work drunk and then driving down Highway 401 in the wrong direction. The judge noted that bar staff had a well-organized designated-driver system that the 23-year-old waitress had used before, and ruled that neither owner necessarily knew she had brought her car that night.
The difficulty of tracing exactly who knew what means that making bystanders liable might not be much of a solution. It's not clear that anyone knew that Mr. Muzzo was wasted before this tragedy and that he would be driving a car in that state.
About a dozen revellers were with him that weekend at his bachelor party in Miami: While it seems as if a young man with a private jet might offer his friends a lift home, maybe they weren't returning to Canada.
Though the three or four drinks that Mr. Muzzo told the court that he enjoyed on the four-hour plane ride home seems like a lot of solo drinking (especially right after a party that had gone until 3 a.m.), at this point, such a revelation wouldn't be shocking.
Having never been on such a plane, I'm not sure if Mr. Muzzo was attended by a flight crew, but even if he was, they could have easily assumed that the young millionaire had a limousine picking him up. Customs officials interacted with him for fewer than 15 minutes – maybe he seemed sober, or merely tipsy, not inebriated enough to have urinated on himself by the time police showed up at the crash scene.
A bystander can only intervene if a bystander exists, and a bystander isn't responsible for someone else's criminal actions. It could be that no one offered Mr. Muzzo a ride home that afternoon after he stumbled, or swaggered, off of his plane, that there was no one who had a chance to stop him before he got into his car and proceeded to destroy numerous lives.
Perhaps there are no what ifs in this situation, just a deep, black hole of grief.