Morrigan Daniels-Dion, who has been sitting in her hospital bed in Edmonton for days, is not just devastated over the loss of her five-year-old daughter in a head-on car crash. She’s furious.
“I’m angry. I’m so angry. I don’t know what to do, because, why would they let him out?” she said on Thursday.
Morrigan’s referring to Ryan Mitchell Greer, a Bonnyville man charged in the fatal car crash on Jan. 14 that changed the Daniels-Dion family’s lives forever.
Police say Greer had stolen a Ford F-350, crashed into a minivan carrying the family just south of Cold Lake, and then fled in another car stolen from the scene. At the time of that crash, Greer was on bail.
‘That was my first baby’
From her U of A hospital bed, Morrigan recalls driving her family – her partner Chase, 10-month-old daughter Charlie and five-year-old daughter, Lilith – through Cold Lake that night.
“We just went grocery shopping, and we went to go visit (Chase’s) mother, Marmie,” she said. The family was headed back home to Frog Lake First Nation and were right near Beaver River Bridge when Morrigan saw a vehicle approaching them.
“I thought my eyes were playing tricks on me, because it did look like he was on my side of the road,” she said. She remembers the oncoming car swerving a few times before they collided head on.
“It was pretty horrifying. I remember everything … I was screaming for help and everything,” she said.
Emergency crews would arrive at the scene of the crash shortly after and pronounce Morrigan’s first daughter, Lilith, dead.
Morrigan sustained two broken ankles and a broken tibia. She’s had surgery to place pins in her leg and was awaiting another surgery on Thursday. Her partner, Chase, had two broken femurs as well as a break in the top part of his arm from the shoulder to the elbow.
What hurts the most, though, is grieving the loss of her young daughter.
“That was my first baby,” she said. “She was so loved … she was visiting her dad’s while she was on winter break, and I had literally just gotten her back.
“She was a character. She loved singing and dancing, performing, she was everybody’s princess … She just loved everybody. She had so many friends and family. She was just so great, so funny. She would say the funniest things and make everybody laugh."
She also loved her baby sister, Charlie, who was her top priority, Morrigan said. Charlie is currently staying with their grandma, Marmie.
“She’s doing really well. She’s herself … I know Charlie doesn’t really understand why we’re not (there), because we always had her 24/7, and this is our first time being away from her,” Morrigan added. “Otherwise she’s 100 per cent herself.”
Morrigan and Chase are hopeful they’ll be released from hospital in a day or two and transferred back home.
Calls for bail reform
Last week, Lilith and Charlie’s grandma set up a fundraiser to help the family cover funeral and hospital costs. It’s since raised almost $7,000, and the family has received an outpouring of support.
“I want people to know her name, because I don’t want my daughter to be a statistic of somebody that was killed by an impaired driver or somebody with a criminal past,” Morrigan said.
“I want her name to be known. I want people to know that she was loved and a big piece of us was taken from us.”
Greer, 34, was what RCMP called a prolific offender who was on bail for breaching a probation order at the time of the crash that killed Lilith.
In a statement to CTV News Edmonton, Alberta Minister of Justice Mickey Amery called Canada’s bail system “broken” and said the province is the “leading voice” in calling on the federal government to accelerate a bail reform bill.
“Our government will not tolerate repeat and violent offenders to keep wreaking havoc on innocent Albertans,” he said.
The federal government told CTV News Edmonton in a statement it “recently introduced the Bail and Sentencing Reform Act to make bail laws stricter and sentencing laws tougher for repeat and violent offenders.
“These reforms reflect commitments we made long before forming government and were shaped by months of extensive consultations, including the Alberta government.”
Dan Jones, a justice studies professor at NorQuest College and retired police inspector, said strict jailing is a case-by-case basis.
“Bail reform isn’t necessarily the panacea, but in this case, you have a person who not only is on bail, but also has several previous convictions, and one of the things they were on bail for was breaching parole or probation,” he told CTV News Edmonton in an interview Thursday.
“If they’re breaching probation, why are we letting this person out if we already know they’re breaching conditions that they’re asked to be on?”
He added that there is, occasionally, a conflation between bail reform and re-offending, which are not always mutually exclusive. In some cases, prolific offenders who are released are simply out because they have served their sentence. Greer’s case was not one of them, he said.
“There are people in remand centres that probably shouldn’t be in remand centres, and there’s people on bail conditions that probably shouldn’t be on bail conditions. And the problem is, there’s no real accountability measure to who decided to let this person out and give them the conditions again,” he added.
“Oftentimes, it’s a judge, and they have judicial freedom.”
Judicial freedom, explains Jones, means the government can give judges direction, but they don’t necessarily need to take it – meaning he’s advocated for a more holistic approach to determining the risk of releasing those in jail on top of current federal provisions for bail releases.
“We need to address it, but we also need to start looking at how we prevent it from even happening. How do we get in front of this? And what are we doing with these individuals when they get out of jail, when they are reintegrating into society? Are we giving them opportunities to succeed?”
RCMP previously said other suspects in the Cold Lake crash have been identified, but no other charges aside from Greer have been laid yet as the investigation is ongoing.
With files from CTV News Edmonton’s Nahreman Issa
