“I took my eyes off the road for just a second.”

That, Officer Robert Reid testified in Ontario Superior Court on Wednesday, is what a “visibly in shock, distraught, upset” Gideon Fekre told him at the scene of a collision on Dundas St. East on April 20, 2015.

Reid testified that he was the first Toronto Police Service officer to arrive after a call to attend shortly after 2:00 p.m. that afternoon. The scene, he said, was confusing — there had been a collision between two vehicles that were on the road, and a crowd of “more than 10” people around “a female on the ground in a parking stall” who was surrounded by “a substantial amount of blood” that appeared to be coming from her head.

That woman, Kristy Hodgson, a pedestrian walking her two dogs who was struck by a Honda Civic while on the sidewalk, would later die of her injuries. Fekre, who Reid said immediately identified himself voluntarily as the driver of the car, is charged with dangerous operation of a motor vehicle causing death.

On Tuesday as the trial opened, the court saw security camera video and heard expert testimony that Fekre’s car had left the road, driven across a bike lane and onto the sidewalk before colliding with Hodgson, before moving back onto the road where it then collided with a Toronto District School Board maintenance truck.

As the trial continued Wednesday, Officer Emerald Rourke, who arrived at the scene soon after 2:25 p.m. and took over some aspects of the investigation from Reid, testified that Fekre was sitting on the sidewalk with his head in his knees when she arrived, and remained in that position, “visibly shaken,” the entire time she investigated, “until he was taken into custody.”

After she approached him and he identified himself as the driver of the Honda Civic, she told the court, she asked him “What happened.”

She said he told her he had been driving the car, returning from the Eaton Centre. “He said he had dropped a bottle of water and reached down to pick it up.” And she testified, he asked about Hodgson’s condition. Asked by Crown Attorney Scott Patterson where Fekre had dropped the bottle, Rourke said “the floor.”

On Tuesday, the court heard expert testimony from police traffic services officer and collision reconstruction expert Dawn Mutis that the path the car followed onto the sidewalk and then back onto the road may be consistent, in her experience, with someone accidentally turning the steering wheel while bending down to pick something up. However, Mutis had acknowledged during cross examination that it was possibly, due to a bend in the road near the scene, that he car had driven up onto the sidewalk by driving straight, without the wheel having been turned.

While Rourke was still in the witness box Wednesday, defence lawyer Jordan Gold read out her testimony from the preliminary hearing in the case, in which she said Fekre told her, “He had dropped a bottle of water down by his feet and reached down in order to retrieve it. And he repeated several times, ‘Is the girl okay?’ ”

Gold asked about the difference between dropping the water bottle onto “the floor” or “down by his feet.” Rourke testified that her notes read “the floor,” and she may have been “surmising” that it was near his feet in her preliminary testimony.

Earlier in the day, the court had heard from Lloyd Bayne, the iron worker who has been employed in the maintenance department of the school board for the past 26 years, and who was driving the white pickup truck Fekre’s car struck when it returned to the road.

He was driving the truck eastbound at the time, he said, more slowly than usual because he was on his way back to the yard to end his day and didn’t want to arrive too early, when he felt “a bump,” a “firm hit” to his truck. “Instinctively,” he told the court, he looked into his passenger-side mirror. “I saw a small black vehicle on my passenger side, which is a bike lane.”

He described leaving his vehicle and becoming aware of the scene. “I saw two dogs, one standing over the other, the other laying on the sidewalk, blood coming from it,” he said. “I saw someone laying in a parking spot behind the sidewalk. I walked over and the woman was laying there, not moving, some slight bleeding coming from her head.” Then, he said, emergency vehicles called by others on the scene began to arrive.

He said he noticed the “young gentleman with his head keeled over between his legs,” who turned out to be the driver of the black car that had struck him.

Before lunch, the crown rested its case after court heard from four witnesses over two days.

Defence lawyers Gold and Thomas Surmanski told the court they intended to file an application for a directed verdict — essentially asking the judge to immediately acquit Fekre of the charge.

In order to return a directed verdict, according to Duhaime’s Law Dictionary, the judge would need to find that the Crown had not met its burden of proof — “that there is ‘no evidence’ of an essential element of the offence.”

Criminal Code section 247 covering dangerous operation of a motor vehicle, under which Fekre is charged, reads, “Every one commits an offence who operates a motor vehicle in a manner that is dangerous to the public, having regard to all the circumstances, including the nature, condition and use of the place at which the motor vehicle is being operated and the amount of traffic that at the time is or might reasonably be expected to be at that place.”

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Subsection four, under which Fekre is charged with causing the death of Hodgson, further reads, “Every one who commits an offence under subsection (1) and thereby causes the death of any other person is guilty of an indictable offence and liable to imprisonment for a term not exceeding 14 years.”

If Mr. Justice Peter Bawden does not grant a directed verdict, the trial will continue as usual, and the defence will have an opportunity to present a case.

Edward Keenan writes on city issues ekeenan@thestar.ca. Follow: @thekeenanwire