Sabastian Prosa sentenced to 5 years in prison in 2012 wrong way crash that killed 2

TORONTO — Sabastian Prosa has been sentenced to five years in prison and faces an eight-year driving ban after being found guilty in June for a 2012 crash that killed a father and his daughter.

Prosa was convicted of 12 charges including impaired driving causing death after he was caught driving in the wrong direction on Highway 427 near a QEW on-ramp on August 5, 2012.

The SUV he was driving struck a minivan carrying the Wijeratne family, who were returning from a vacation in Florida.

READ MORE: Sentence expected for man guilty in 2012 crash that killed father, daughter

Jayantha Wijeratne, 49, and his 16-year-old daughter Eleesa were killed. Eleesa’s mother Antonette was also in the van and was seriously injured.

“I’m not pleased with the sentence at all. I’m kind of disappointed, he took two precious lives and I’m permanently injured. It will never be enough because he got only five years jail time, we got life sentences three years ago,” said Antonette Wijeratne, adding that the Canadian legal system is too lenient on impaired drivers.

“As a mother who has lost a child, as a wife who has lost a husband and as the severely injured victim of drunk driving I now plead earnestly to the authorities responsible to introduce these long overdue impaired driving amendments before it impacts another family.”

Antonette said she “expected more” from the verdict and said she was a happy mother and wife before the collision occurred, which left behind her and her son “grieving forever.”

“Today, another beautiful family is going through the same unimaginably tragedy of losing all of their children and grandfather,” she said, referring to a fatal collision on Sept. 27.

“These deaths are not accidents, these are deliberate actions, they are crimes. Parents continue to lose their children because of someone else’s senseless, selfish and stupid decisions to drink and drive. It can happen to your family tomorrow. These deaths are 100 per cent preventable and they must stop.”

Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne said she was not going to comment on the sentence, but offered condolences to the family and said what happened to them was “incredibly tragic.”

“What I know is that the pain that is felt by this family is permanent and it’s hard to imagine that there would be a way to alleviate that,” Wynne said.

“We have increased penalties as a government we’ve increased penalties over the time that we’ve been in office and what I have said is that if there are things that we need to do, if there are more severe penalties that need to be put in place we’ll certainly look into that.”

READ MORE: Teen charged with drunk driving after crash that killed father, daughter

Family friend Richard Harris said Eleesa was an “awesome person” and said he was hoping the judge would set a precedent in this case to deter other impaired drivers with a harsher sentence.

“When a judge stands up and says, ‘You know what? Here’s your 10, 12 years.’ That’s the only time it’s going to stop. There is no precedence out there to show that killing people and getting drunk is not acceptable,” he said.

“They could’ve come down with a little bit more of a sentence than five years … I hope one day a judge stands up and says, ‘Enough is enough.'”

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Prosa, who was 19 at the time of the crash, admitted he drank before the crash but said he believed he was drugged.

Prosa’s lawyer pushed for the case to be thrown out because part of a blood sample submitted as evidence in the case was lost and could not be tested for drugs.

Justice Glenn Hainey dismissed the request for a stay on the proceedings despite the fact he found the forensics staff were careless in losing highly relevant evidence.

With files from David Shum and Caryn Lieberman