Bryan Robinson woke with a bang early Sunday morning.

Just before 3:30 a.m., out the rear windows of his house on Hawkshead Cres. in Scarborough, he was greeted with carnage — his fence completely ripped to shreds as if a tornado had blown through.

To the left was the remains of a mangled black Porsche, pieces of it scattered for several metres down McNicoll Ave. and lying on his lawn.

At first, he barely noticed something lying near his back door — likely a piece of the car’s engine, Robinson remembered thinking.

Then he saw a man on his feet, searching the backyard.

“He was walking around like he was looking for somebody,” Robinson said. “Then when I turned on the lights, the body was at my feet.”

There lay the gravely injured passenger of the car who had been ejected after police say the other unidentified man — the driver of the Porsche — lost control, hitting a tree and spiraling through the air and four backyard fences.

“The guy was still breathing,” Robinson said.

The family described how the driver knelt down near the injured man.

The driver, his own face bloody, laid a hand softly on his passenger before residents who had gathered in the wake of the crash instructed him not to touch or move the injured man.

“He seemed pretty coherent at the time,” Robinson said of the driver. “He was just in shock.”

An ambulance — Robinson’s family had called — arrived within minutes.

The passenger was pronounced dead at the scene. His name is being withheld pending notification of next of kin. The driver was taken to nearby Scarborough Grace Hospital with minor injuries.

Toronto police Traffic Services officers are investigating the crash. No charges had been laid as of Sunday evening.

Police say both men were in their 20s and the car had been a new lease. The bill of sale was found intact at the scene, one officer said, putting the value of the car at nearly $120,000.

Residents of the surrounding area drove and walked by curiously on Sunday, stopping at the sight of the police tape and debris.

Salima Printer, who lives seven houses down from Robinson, was awoken by another neighbour Sunday morning to find the Porsche’s passenger door dislodged and smashed through a section of her fence.

A tree just beyond her backyard had the bark stripped from its base

On Sunday afternoon, Beverly Lawson stood in her now open backyard — only three houses over from Robinson’s — taking pictures. Shards of wood littered most of the lawn and a mess of chain-link fence lay next door. Tree branches lay scattered about.

In the distance, police officers were making efforts to right the Porsche — its front end in pieces — from its final resting place on its side in a laneway between Hawkshead Cres. and McNicoll Ave.

Officers towed the car back onto the street shortly after noon, before a flatbed truck arrived to take it away.

“We’re always hearing cars racing along . . . We always hear accidents here,” Lawson said looking out to the stretch of asphalt between Birchmount Rd. and Warden Ave. “This is the first this bad.”

Just outside her backyard, a backpack lay slumped against a tree and a lone sneaker sat on the sidewalk. An acrid smell lingered in the air.

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As startling as it was for residents to awaken to the scene in their backyards, Lawson said she felt awful for the families who would have received worse wake-up calls.

“That’s not the news you want to get at 5 o’clock in the morning,” she said.

With files from Graham Slaughter