What remains of Paul Bonney’s best friend lies beneath a slab of stone outside the English town of Doncaster. The man buried there, a drum technician named Scott Johnson, was crushed to death four years ago, when a stage collapsed at Downsview Park in northwest Toronto, hours before a Radiohead concert.

Bonney has known where to find his friend, but couldn’t bring himself to visit the grave until earlier this year, in late winter.

“It’s taken all these years for me to go and say hello to Scott,” Bonney said over the phone from Manchester. “We were best of mates, best of mates … It was time.”

The shock and hurt of Johnson’s death, at 33, hasn’t subsided for his closest friends and family, particularly his parents Ken and Sue, said Bonney. June 16 marks the fourth anniversary of the incident, a poignant milestone made all the more raw by the still-lumbering court case between the provincial labour ministry and the organizers and stage riggers of the fateful rock show.

“It’s a bad time all ‘round, really,” Bonney said. “All the memories start flooding back about Scott and what happened. I just want the court case to get put to bed.”

Tuesday afternoon, as sunlight streamed through the clouded glass windows of a second-floor courtroom at Old City Hall, the trial stemming from Johnson’s death continued. Almost one year after the stage collapse at Downsview Park, which killed Johnson and injured three others, the Ministry of Labour laid 13 charges under the province’s Occupational Health and Safety Act. They are levelled against concert organizer Live Nation Canada Inc., constructor Live Nation Ontario Concerts GP Inc., a third company called Optex Staging and Services Inc., and an engineer from Bolton named Dominic Cugliari.

On the stand Tuesday was Ministry of Labour engineer Saeed Khorsand, one of two people who investigated the cause of the stage collapse for the provincial government. They surveyed the scene, analyzed designs for the stage and performed tests in a lab at McMaster University to determine how the roof of the stage structure gave way. Crown lawyer David McCaskill summed up their conclusion thusly: “Essentially it was too much weight and not enough support.”

Johnson’s father, Ken, has been following the trial closely, and is up-to-speed on the intricate findings of the engineers, McCaskill added, since he works for a scaffolding association in the United Kingdom. But as the court case continues, with lawyers from four parties arguing about who to blame for Johnson’s death, his family has been craving closure, Bonney said. The trial, according to the Crown, isn’t expected to wrap up until next January.

Mandy Wojcik, a labour lawyer with Goldblatt Partners in Toronto, said it’s not unusual for trials involving charges under the Occupational Health and Safety Act to take this long — even more so in this case because of the government’s investigation before charges were laid.

“Anytime you have lots of parties involved, especially when the consequences are so high, that would lead to proceedings taking a long time,” Wojcik said. “The wheels of justice turn very slowly, so it’s not a huge surprise.”

The whole process started on a day Alex Mihan remembers vividly. Whenever she hears a Radiohead song, her mind rushes back to Downsview Park four years ago. She was 23 at the time, helping set up a beer tent a few hundred yards away from the stage. The concert was set to begin in a few hours, and she was excited.

Then: a commotion.

“The entire top of the stage collapsed forward,” she said. “It was like closing the lid on a box.”

She later found out that someone was under there, that someone had died. “It gives me an eerie feeling,” she said. “That was my first real experience with death, and my first time technically being there when someone had passed.”

Jim Digby has carried around that feeling since 1983, when in the hours before the grand opening of a night club, a young woman working with him was struck by a falling light fixture that pierced her skull and killed her. In the wake of the 2011 Indiana State Fair disaster, when heavy winds knocked a stage down and killed seven people, Digby decided it was time to push for increased safety awareness in the music staging business.

In early 2012, the production manager who has worked with artists like Linkin Park and Marilyn Manson spearheaded the creation of the Event Safety Alliance. The aim is to create clearer guidelines about safe practices in every area of organizing performances, from building scaffolding and setting up large outdoor stages, to establishing evacuation plans and planning for inclement weather.

“Our mission has been to collect and distil the standards and codes that already apply to us that many aren’t aware of,” said Digby, explaining that this can allow people working in the industry to more easily understand best practices, while also tipping them off to when things aren’t as safe as possible.

“We have begun to change the culture,” he said.

People have been pushing similar changes in Ontario. After the Radiohead stage collapse, Janet Sellery, a performance health and safety consultant who works in Stratford, began consultations with the provincial government to improve safety at such events. The result, released in 2013, was guidelines published by the Ministry of Labour that lists safety concerns for those setting up concert venues in the province.

Sellery said the guideline is an example of how there’s a growing willingness to place safety at the heart of this corner of the entertainment industry.

“There was a time when I felt like a single candle in the darkness,” she said. “What’s really encouraging to me is to see the level of discussion that’s going on.”

Johnson’s best friend, Bonney, has been the drummer in the Australian Pink Floyd Experience tribute band for almost 20 years. Since Johnson’s death, Bonney said he can’t get onstage without worrying something might happen. Fear follows him around.

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But in the end, whether there are punishments or not, he wants the Radiohead stage collapse trial to end fairly.

“I just want justice for what happened really. And I want Scott’s parents Ken and Sue, to get this, because it’s a major ordeal for them both,” he said.

Correction: June 11, 2016 — This article has been updated from a previous version that misstated the first name of Mandy Wojcik.