Toronto officer likely would not have had time to get up before he was run over, expert testifies
Global News
That testimony comes as the Crown suggests Det. Const. Jeffrey Northrup may not have fallen to the ground.
A crash reconstructionist is telling jurors it’s highly unlikely a Toronto police officer who he says was knocked to the ground in an underground parking garage would have been able to get up before he was run over by a car.
Under cross-examination by the prosecution, Barry Raftery told the court it would be unfair to expect anyone to be able to get up in the roughly three seconds that elapsed between those two occurrences.
That testimony comes as the Crown suggests Det. Const. Jeffrey Northrup may not have fallen to the ground.
Raftery, who has been called as an expert witness by the defence, is testifying at the trial of .
Zameer has pleaded not guilty to first-degree murder in the death of Northrup, who died after he was struck by a vehicle in an underground parking garage at Toronto City Hall shortly after midnight on July 2, 2021.
Raftery testified Monday that the physical evidence from the scene and Zameer’s car indicates Northrup was knocked off balance by a “glancing” contact while the car was reversing, and was already on the ground when he was run over by it travelling forward.
He pointed to a disturbance in the dust on the front fender as evidence of that glancing contact, and said the absence of damage to the front fender and hood show Northrup wasn’t run over while standing.
Court has heard Northrup was more than six feet tall and weighed close to 300 pounds.
