According to a report for Rochester, N.Y., newspaper the Democrat & Chronicle, one of the keys to an Ontario County grand jury deciding not to charge Tony Stewart in the death of Kevin Ward Jr. was the reconstruction of the accident.

The report says that Gary Wayne Cooper, a prominent accident reconstructionist from the Chicago area, dissected the available videos of the Aug. 9 accident, using super slow-motion to re-create the incident in frames broken down into fractions of seconds.

Shortly after Cooper’s presentation, the 23-person grand jury decided not to criminally charge Stewart.

“[We had testimony from] one of the forensics experts who had, of course, taken all of the videos, broken them down into separate frames of second, and thoroughly broke everything down to the point where you more clearly could see precisely what happened -- the distance and time factors, the physics of the accident,” Rochester attorney John Speranza told the Democrat & Chronicle.

Speranza is acting as local counsel for Stewart, who is also being represented by the Indianapolis law firm of Voyles, Zahn and Paul.

According to Speranza, the state police also reconstructed the accident.

The report said that the defense reconstruction concluded that there were only 1.3 seconds between the time one car passed Ward, who was walking on the track, and the moment Stewart’s car hit him.

Speranza told the Rochester paper that he didn’t know if the state police reconstruction came to the same conclusion, but that the grand jury, who saw both presentations, decided Stewart hadn’t acted recklessly.

“We did a complete independent investigation with a private investigator,” Speranza told the Democrat & Chronicle. “We interviewed probably 10 to 20 witnesses, many of them, of course, the same witnesses that the police had interviewed.”

This content is created and maintained by a third party, and imported onto this page to help users provide their email addresses. You may be able to find more information about this and similar content at piano.io