Kasia Briegmann-Samson thought of 20 possible reasons why her husband might have missed his breakfast date with friends after leaving their west-end Toronto home on his bicycle early last Nov. 23.

None came close to imagining the horror of what had happened to Tom Samson, a Grade 2 teacher at Swansea Public School.

Initially, police told her Samson was struck and killed by a van at 6:43 a.m., after riding his bicycle through a red light in the intersection of Lansdowne Ave. and Davenport Rd. Police also told her he had been riding his bike northbound.

“They blamed Tom,” his widow says gravely, her emotions still raw, sitting in the screened-in veranda of the family’s home. She was stunned when police told her they were only charging Miguel Oliveira, 23, the alleged driver of the minivan that hit Samson, with failing to remain at the scene of an accident that caused death.

Samson was a cautious rider who always donned a helmet before settling into the saddle of his treasured hand-me-down bike. He often warned the couple’s children, Evora, 7, and Oscar, 5, about the dangers of failing to follow the rules of the road. “He told them the car will always win. Don’t take chances. You have nothing to prove,” says Briegmann-Samson.

Samson was Toronto’s 39th traffic fatality of 2012.

Months later, after feeling “dragged through the mud,” and frustrated their questions were going unanswered because the matter was “before the courts,” the grief-stricken family hired prominent criminal lawyer Edward Sapiano.

He wrote numerous letters demanding copies of the accident reconstruction report, witness statements and investigator notes. In May, the prosecutor in the case confirmed that the Crown is “not taking the position that Tom was travelling north or that he ran a red light,” Sapiano wrote in a letter to Toronto police. It’s unclear what prompted the change.

Sapiano believes the initial conclusions were the result of a shoddy investigation, something he suggests is indicative of a systemic failure by police to conduct thorough investigations when cyclists or pedestrians are killed after being struck by cars on city streets.

“A drug-dealing criminal who is shot and killed during a deal gone bad gets a higher degree of investigative services from the TPS,” Sapiano wrote in a letter to the Toronto Police Service.

Sapiano is calling on police and the Crown to reopen the case, now that they’re acknowledging Samson was stationary or near-stationary, waiting to turn left, as he was lawfully obliged to be, when he was rammed from behind.

He obtained a copy of Oliveira’s driving record. Between July 2010 and last December, Oliveira had eight driving infractions, including failing to come to a stop, disobeying a police signal, violating novice driving conditions and speeding (120 km/h in a 100 km/h zone).

Toronto police spokesman Mark Pugash rejects Sapiano’s assessment that it was a shoddy investigation.

Because of the court case, he can’t go into specifics in Samson’s death, Pugash says, but he’s confident investigators determined there was insufficient evidence to support a charge beyond the charge laid, of failing to remain at the scene of an accident where death occurred.

Pugash said it’s not at all unusual, and “absolutely understandable,” that in the aftermath of tragedies, the victim’s loved ones find it hard to accept if police don’t charge the driver involved with a serious offence. “But the fact is, every officer, whether they’re a traffic officer or not, their job is to evaluate the situation and follow the evidence where it goes.”

Defence lawyer Calvin Barry, who is representing Oliveira, is confident police did a thorough job and do not need to reopen the investigation.

“In my view, the police had reasonable and probable grounds to lay the charge they did,” Barry said. The preliminary hearing is set for next spring.

Roy E. Lucke, a former suburban Chicago police officer and director of transportation safety programs at Northwestern University in Illinois, agrees that, regardless of how an investigation was handled, the party receiving the “unfavourable outcome” isn’t going to be happy.

“Whether or not that’s accurate is obviously a whole other story.”

Yet he believes that, generally speaking, police forces around North America do not dedicate adequate resources to doing thorough and proper investigations into deaths when the victim was on foot or riding a bike.

“It’s resources and priorities, and often it can be a bit of a case of jumping to a conclusion that it was a simple driving error … as opposed to what might be criminal negligence,” Lucke said. “We owe it to the victims to do that investigation.”

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Amanda McKinnie is a veteran Toronto police officer who was “very unhappy” with her own force’s investigation into her husband’s death, which left her raising four children on her own.

Her husband, Alan Tamane, 47, was killed riding his bike on Bayview Ave., south of Highway 401, in 2007. It happened during Bike to Work week as Tamane, an immunologist, was on his morning commute to Sunnybrook Hospital.

McKinnie believes her husband died in a road rage incident, but says the lead investigator — a constable — wore blinders and was quick to blame Tamane. She watched an interview of the man driving the truck that hit her husband, “and it wasn’t an investigative interview at all; they already made up their mind. It was a formality.” No one was charged.

“Part of the problem is you have these traffic investigators who’ve never ridden a bike before in their life, never cycled, and they really have no sense of what it’s like to be on a bike on the road,” she says.

“They investigate it from a very biased, driver-supported view, which I think happened in this case.” Rather than traffic officers, she would like to see homicide detectives, or detectives with similar training, conduct vehicular fatalities.

Pugash responds that the homicide squad has called upon the expertise of traffic service officers where criminal charges are laid.

Raynald Marchand, general manager of the Canadian Safety Council, says there are some good investigations and some that are not so good.

Police assigned to probe traffic deaths also face factors that might affect the quality of the investigation, such as the availability of resources, other calls coming in, and the challenge of analyzing crash scenes in pressure-cooker situations.

“You’ve been on the 401 and it’s stopped because of a collision and everyone wishes that they get it wrapped up and get it moving,” Marchand says.

“That’s very different from a homicide (investigation) — you can go into the dwelling and take pictures and look at different angles, and take samples, because nobody is going, ‘Hurry up, I need to rent the joint.’”

Still, McKinnie thinks there is a broader societal attitude that pedestrian and cyclist deaths are “collateral damage” we put up with because of our love affair with the car.

“We accept a certain number of deaths, and not much effort is put into investigating them and holding people accountable.”

Her impression is that investigators may “blame the dead guy because that’s the easiest thing to do.”

Briegmann-Samson agrees. She says that in some respects, people feel comforted when a victim appears to have contributed to his or her death. “It’s a big relief — that it’s a freak accident, he did something wrong. It’s reassuring and gives a completely false sense of security.”