Jinghao Zhou was sent to Canada to bring honour to his family and take advantage of Canada’s enormous opportunities.

But the only child of industrious parents failed long before he plowed into 60-year-old Free Press carrier Gloria Chivers, killing her after a night of heavy drinking.

He’d flunked out of business and economics at Brock University, came to London for English courses at Fanshawe College he rarely attended and fell in with some young Canadianized Chinese nationals who helped him get drunk, get fake immigration documents and also fleeced him of his money.

Then, on Nov. 24, 2016, the 24-year-old fish and tackle shop owner got behind the wheel of a leased Dodge Durango — his Maserati was in the shop — and flew down Sunningdale Road through a red light, plowing into Chivers, who was delivering newspapers.

In an instant, all the deceit became a son’s shame.

“I killed an innocent woman. I hurt her family,” Zhou said through a Mandarin interpreter at his sentencing Thursday for impaired driving causing death, filing false documents and making false statements to immigration officials.

“I have let my parents down. I have failed the people of Canada and I have let myself down.”

In the front row were his anxious parents, who were only allowed to have one child under China’s former policy. Since the crash, they have put their lives on hold, moved to Canada on a visa and intend to wait here until their son, for whom they had high hopes, is sent home.

Zhou is facing a prison sentence, followed by a one-way trip back to China, never to return.

His blood-alcohol reading taken more than two hours after the crash was 189 mg of alcohol in 100 millilitres of blood and could have been as high as 240 mg — three times the legal limit.

When Zhou hit Chivers’ car head-on, pushing it back 90 metres, he was going an estimated 188 km/h — three times the posted limit.

“He wasn’t driving a car that night, your honour,” said assistant Crown attorney George Christakos to Ontario Court Justice Thomas McKay.

“He was driving a torpedo.”

Christakos read the moving victim impact statement of Chivers’ widower, Chris, who was too distraught to come to court. Her sister, Ruth Summerhill, and brother, Milton Brock, were in the court with family members.

“This punk not only killed my wife, he destroyed my life,” Chris Chivers wrote. “I have no one to love.”

So severe was the crash, that the police, coroner and funeral home wouldn’t let him see his wife’s body. All they could give him was her shattered cellphone. “Shattered lives,” he wrote, referring to a photo of the phone.

They were married “longer than you’ve been alive,” Chris Chivers wrote directly to Zhou. Losing his wife has brought him “untold grief.”

But, worse, Chris Chivers wrote is “you have brought shame to your family.”

“Upon deportation to your homeland, I am confident like the rest of my life, your experience will be even more miserable,” he wrote.

That mirrored the suggestion from Zhou’s defence lawyer Jim Dean who suggested a four-year sentence on all charges.

Dean said Zhou’s educational experience in Canada was dreadful and he had trouble with both the language and the culture.

Meanwhile, his family expected him to succeed and Zhou “bore the burden of letting them down.”

But instead of going home, he handed $45,000 to a “friend” who had convinced him to open the fish and tackle store. Zhou also paid $17,000 to someone who promised him a legal work permit, even though he had suspicions it would be fake.

Dean said Zhou remembers most of what happened the night of the crash. He had been drinking with friends and was on the way home. He’s been in custody ever since and has been a model inmate.

Dean suggested Zhou was unfamiliar with the public education campaigns in Canada about the dangers of drinking and driving and didn’t have that exposure in China. And he didn’t start drinking until he came here.

Christakos asked for six years on the impaired conviction and started his argument by telling McKay that there have been impaired driving public service campaigns in China since 2011.

Too often, he said, the courts are dealing with impaired drivers and a strong message needs to be sent. He noted some of the case law comes directly from serious crashes in the London area, including Andrew Kummer, who killed two children and an adult, Jared Dejong, who hit and killed a young Western student, and Mason Neufeld, whose car struck a man standing on his front lawn.

“These are the cases where the public is watching and the public can learn,” Christakos said.

Federal prosecutor Ben Eberhard asked for two more years in prison plus a $10,000 fine for the immigration offences, bringing the total jail term proposed by the prosecution to eight years.

Even before the terrible crash, Eberhard said that by knowingly staying in Canada illegally, Zhou was “perpetuating a daily fraud on the Canadian immigration system.”

He noted that Zhou didn’t struggle with English, but chose not to attend classes, calling his effort “not a fear of failure, but fear of trying or unwillingness of trying.”

Zhou insisted he was “a good person” before the crash and vowed “in the remainder of my life I will work hard and try to do the right thing.”

Chivers’ sister said this was just “a no-win situation.”

“There are two families who have been very affected by this,” Summerhill said outside court.

“No sentence will ever bring back Gloria or ever bring back their son. And he has to live with that every day of his life.”

But her sister certainly didn’t deserve this fate. Chivers, she said, “was dedicated to the The London Free Press for over 20 years. She got up in the morning and did jobs that no one else would do.”

“She went and got her papers and delivered them to the people of Thorndale who loved her greatly,” Summerhill said.

“And I will miss her forever and ever. I think of her every day.”

jsims@postmedia.com