MOUNT FOREST, ONT.—When Onias Frey worked at the farm-machine shop, he often stopped by a friend’s house to pick up his children and drop them at school. It was on his way. The sunny, clear Monday morning in mid-November was one of those days.

Like most Old Order Mennonites in this farming town, getting from one place to another means hitching your buggy to a horse.

Frey, 60, left his three-room bungalow dressed in a dark wool cap and coat just on Nov. 14, 2011. It was just before 8 a.m. He and Buster, a brown gelding, went west on Sligo Rd. E., the buggy’s right wheels cutting an inch-wide trail through the road’s soft gravelly shoulder, which is where they always drove. Where the shoulder was wider, they avoided the pavement altogether — one of the Mennonites’ unofficial rules of the road. They were coming up on Wellington Secondary School — his home still in the rear-view mirror — when a two-tonne Ford Edge crashed into the buggy from behind.

What happened in the moments, days and weeks following left the severely injured Frey reincarnated as a “Miracle Man” and residents in this sleepy community two hours northwest of Toronto concerned that Ontario Provincial Police were rallying to protect the Ford driver — one of its own officers — from public scrutiny.

The black, wooden, covered coach “exploded” into splinters, eyewitnesses said.

Most of Buster’s lifeless 450-kilogram body (about 1,000 pounds) — his head twisted backwards and a leg torn clean off — landed 30 metres from Frey, who was found non-responsive in a ditch.

He had not picked up the schoolchildren yet.

Frey’s injuries were extensive, “life-threatening,” police said. A dozen fractured vertebrae. Ten of 24 ribs broken. Both lungs punctured and collapsed. His spleen was torn and had to be removed. There was bleeding in his brain. A broken collarbone. He spent a month in hospital — the first two weeks sedated and attached to a breathing machine.

The driver of the Ford Edge, a crossover utility vehicle, was not hurt.

The driver was also not named in the police media release, a detail often included in such reports.

But locals knew exactly who was behind the wheel: an affable OPP sergeant (off-duty at the time) eligible to retire in April after 30 years of service. Roger Woods, 51. A native of Mount Forest. A former high school basketball player who now raises sheep and lamb for slaughter. Father of two: a son who followed him into policing and a daughter who is studying to become a nurse like her mother.

Since the accident, Woods has become one of the few non-Mennonites to regularly visit Frey. He drove Mennonites to Hamilton to visit Frey in hospital. He paid for the lumber Frey’s nephews used to build a wheelchair ramp at the back of their uncle’s house.

What locals didn’t understand was why police seemed reluctant to name Woods or charge him.

The lack of on-the-record information around the case became the talk of the town two months later when another horse-drawn buggy was hit. On Jan. 13 in Kenilworth, an 11-year-old boy named Landis Martin was killed after Benjamin Peters’ pickup truck struck the coach from behind. The impact catapulted Landis and his two older brothers from the buggy. In that case, the OPP identified the 19-year-old driver immediately and police announced they are investigating.

Shortly after, the Mount Forest Confederate published an editorial questioning the OPP’s inconsistent approach to accident reporting in an article titled, “Two buggy accidents, two different reports.”

“I thought it was very strange that a few weeks later, the person who hit the kid in the buggy was named and (Woods) wasn’t,” Lynne Turner, the newspaper’s editor, told the Toronto Star. Another local newspaper, the Wellington Advertiser, eventually got police to confirm Woods’ name, but not his occupation.

High school teacher Matthew Timberlake, one of the first people to attend to Frey at the crash site, said he received emails from parents concerned over whether justice was being served in the case.

“It was known it was a police officer who hit him,” the teacher said. “People were upset there were no charges.”

Timberlake said an OPP officer arrived at the crash about 10 minutes after he did. He said he checked on Frey in the ditch briefly before heading over to talk with Woods.

“They walked away from the scene for a bit,” Timberlake said.

“It was a terrible accident,” he said. “He obviously didn’t do it on purpose but from some of the things I’ve heard, it wasn’t like lightning struck and the accident happened. There was no exceptional weather happening that day.”

In 2010, in Powassan Township, just outside of North Bay, police named and laid a criminal charge of dangerous driving against 71-year-old Bob Gray within three weeks of his car hitting a horse-drawn buggy. The driver, Omar Eicher, 61, suffered a spinal injury. His legs were crushed. His horse died at the scene. The Star does not know the outcome of that case.

The Frey case, meanwhile, seemed to stall.

Nothing happened until after an anonymous letter directed to politicians across the province — including Premier Dalton McGuinty, local MPPs and the Attorney General’s office — as well as the Toronto Star and other media, suggested the police force was failing in its duty to investigate and hold accountable “one of its own.” The letter was received by the Star in late January.

On Feb. 9 — three months after the accident — OPP posted a brief news release on its website stating that Woods had been charged with careless driving.

“Best-case scenario,” Woods told the Star at his home in Mount Forest, would have been a charge of following too closely. “Worst-case scenario,” he said, is what he got.

He makes his first appearance at the provincial court in Guelph on March 7.

If convicted, he could receive six demerit points, be fined up to $2,000 and face potential imprisonment.

OPP spokesman Sgt. Dave Rektor, however, said in an accident like Frey’s, the more serious, criminal charge of dangerous driving would have also been an option. A conviction would result in a criminal record and an automatic one-year licence suspension.

Police have refused to provide the Star with details of the accident or investigation.

Sgt. Bob Uridil, who said he was one of eight officers assigned to the case, described the investigation as unusually complex. When the Star asked him to elaborate, he told the reporter to hang on and then hung up the phone.

Reached again, he advised the Star to direct all questions to Rektor, the police spokesman.

Rektor said he did not know what Uridil meant by “complex.”

He also said Woods was not identified as a member of the OPP in the news release because the accident occurred while he was off duty. He refused to say how fast the sergeant was going at the time of the accident — a detail that would have been included in the technical collision investigators’ report.

The posted speed limit outside the high school was 50 km/h.

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Locals speculate a car would have to be travelling much faster than that to launch a 1,000-pound horse 30 metres down the road.

Rektor blamed provincial lawyers for the long delay in laying charges. He said “the investigation was stalled by the review of the accident by the Crown’s office.”

The Attorney General’s office refused to confirm Rektor’s explanation. Spokesman Brendan Crawley said it is ultimately up to police to lay a charge in such situations.

Frey was released from hospital on Dec. 19. His return has been marked with near-daily visits from people in his community.

Earlier this month, a group of 40 schoolchildren stopped by to sing for him.

A notebook is filled with the names of visitors, their words of encouragement and notations of the gifts they brought with them: snack crackers, raw fruits, vegetable soup, cookies, a dish of buns, a chunk of homemade cheese.

Around town, some started calling Frey the “Miracle Man,” said retired police chief Kenneth Iles, who has known both the Mennonite and Woods for decades.

“A lot of people didn’t expect him to come home,” Iles said.

“Maybe police laid off laying charges for a while until he got out of hospital — to see if he survives.”

Iles, an animal lover who reads Amish fiction, said he has thought about buying Frey a new horse.

“I’m kind of torn between the two of them,” he said. “I love them both.”

Reached at his farm, Woods said he takes full responsibility for the accident and wished it never happened.

“I made a mistake and I readily admit it,” he said.

He is worried that if he retires in April, people will think he was forced to. He wants to move on.

“You guys are making way more out of this,” he said. “I don’t want to talk about this anymore. It happened in November.”

Frey, meanwhile, is travelling a long road to recovery.

His sister Salome and her husband, Ion Martin, who announced their plans to marry the day before the accident, have moved into Frey’s grey bungalow to help care for him.

Martin’s first wife died in a buggy accident in Elmira 11 years earlier, as did his in-laws before her. Both were struck by trucks.

“It seems like it’s a part of my life,” he said.

Frey has made progress. He now uses a wooden cane to get around instead of a wheelchair. He takes blood thinners to prevent fatal clotting and sees a physiotherapist three times a week.

But he is nowhere near fit enough to return to work or drive a buggy or do the chores he used to do morning and night. He sleeps in a hospital bed at home and tires easily after cleaning a few dozen eggs laid by the chickens he keeps in his barn.

“I know Roger well enough that it’s too bad it happened and he wished it didn’t,” Frey said. “But it did.”