An aerial view of the collapsed stage. (Photo by Tara Walton/Toronto Star/Getty Images)

On June 7, 2013, after a year-long investigation, Ontario’s Ministry of Labour filed charges under the province’s Occupational Health and Safety Act: four against Live Nation Canada, four against Live Nation Ontario Concerts, four against scaffolder Optex Staging & Services, and one against the independent engineer Domenic Cugliari. (A phone mailbox for Optex was full; Cugliari didn’t return a phone message prior to deadline.) At the time, Live Nation issued a statement denying any wrongdoing and vowing to “vigorously defend” itself.

In the courts as in sports, running out the clock can be a vigorous form of defense. Two years later—and three years after Scott’s death—the trial was finally set to begin. Ken Johnson says he booked plane tickets for the June 2015 hearings, but the dates were canceled a couple weeks before, partly because Optex still didn’t have a lawyer (Optex president Dale Martin ended up representing himself). At last, in November 2015, the court heard testimony from Radiohead’s crew members and management. Ken flew to Toronto for the proceedings.

After about 15 days of hearings last November, the court agreed to hold another roughly 15 days of hearings scattered throughout 2016, and Ken Johnson again booked a June flight to Toronto, figuring he’d be seeing the last three days of the case. Then, shortly before he was supposed to travel, the defense asked for another 15 days to present its side of the case. Ken canceled yet another trip. “I can’t afford to be flying back and forth, and I can’t afford the time away from work,” he says. “So I’d already decided the best I could do was to be there for the summing up.”

The continuing trial dates are scheduled for December 5, 7, 8, 12-16, and 19-22, along with January 25-27, 2017. Then, before the end of June, the defense argued to the judge that the prosecutor’s evidence wasn’t sufficient to convict on all 13 charges, Ken says, calling the move another “trick.” The judge agreed that the three of the charges might’ve been difficult for him to bring to a judgment, based on the evidence presented. Two of the charges against Live Nation were dropped, and one against Optex. That leaves six charges against Live Nation, three against Optex, and one against Cugliari. “This weekend I thought if they keep complaining maybe they can try to get one charge reduced at a time,” Ken says, “and it will probably get resolved long after I’m gone, I’m afraid.”

In recent weeks, Ken and Scott’s mother, Sue, got another shock. In July, the Supreme Court of Canada overhauled the rules for a criminal defendant’s right to be tried within a reasonable time frame. Now, on October 14, Live Nation and its fellow defendants are set to argue that this ruling applies to their case. “They’ve already caused most of the delays,” Ken says. “There was nothing new in the evidence that the prosecutors presented that they hadn’t already had prior to the case starting.”

Another heartbreaking irony in the case is Ken’s profession. He has been on the technical committee of the UK’s National Access and Scaffolding Confederation for 20 years, working for the last half-decade as an advisor on health and safety matters as well. He has managed scaffolding-related businesses on a global level, so he knows better than most how to avoid the type of accident that killed his son.

So what went wrong? Ken says for him the first red flag would have been a dramatic increase in labor; the workforce almost doubled in the last few days of finishing the stage, with subcontractor riggers working 18-hour days, he contends. A curtain at the back had also dropped down about six inches, an amount indicating the scaffolding had been deformed, he says. Finally, Ken says, although the scaffolding company boasted that it had built this stage about 24 times previously, the scaffolder had never actually built this stage with the weight of Radiohead’s equipment on there. And that weight would’ve been significant: The show was for The King of Limbs tour, which had extensive visual elements and required 11 trucks to transport. “It won’t make any difference, to be honest, if I knew all the bloody answers to the questions,” he concedes. “I just feel that they’re not being fair on Scott.”