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Darryl Westgate should have been safe.

On a clear summer day, when he and his elderly parents were measuring to plant trees at their Middlesex County, Ont., family home, he never saw a drunk Mason Neufeld, 36, and his speeding car hurtling toward him on the front lawn.

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Westgate died instantly, Ontario Court Justice Eleanor Schnall said Friday at Neufeld’s sentencing hearing when he was sent to prison for 50 months for impaired driving causing death and banned from driving for seven years.

She declined to detail how Westgate died except to say that “in my 25 years on the bench, I have never come across a description of injuries that are more horrific than those which caused the death of Mr. Westgate.”

In my 25 years on the bench, I have never come across a description of injuries that are more horrific than those which caused the death of Mr. Westgate

It was with that backdrop that the all too familiar story was laid out about a remorseful driver who drank too much and an innocent victim killed.

Schnall has presided over similar tragic cases before. Last year, she sentenced Jared Dejong, 26, to five years in prison and banned him from driving for 10 years in the death of 18-year-old Western University student Andrea Christidis, who died in October 2015 from catastrophic injures after she was struck by Dejong’s car on campus while walking back to her dorm.