Regina’s Chad Ritsco remembers the highway in front of him just before a horrific highway crash, he remembers the sound of his son crying right after it happened, and he remembers rescuers having to cut off his boot to get his foot out of the mangled remains of his truck.
It has been three years since that crash and Ritsco and his son, who was eight years old at the time, are still dealing with the aftermath and are fighting for what he believes should be his.
Ritsco, his son and a friend were on a hunting trip and were driving down a highway north of Melville when another vehicle started coming toward them. Ritsco says the other vehicle was getting close to the centre line and then was in his lane as Ritsco was slowing down and pulling over on the narrow road.
“Then at the last second he swerved right into us …,” remembers Ritsco.
“We were trapped in my vehicle and I was conscious for the whole thing and right away I could hear (my son) crying so I was glad he was alive and then …,” Ritsco pauses. “I didn’t hear anything from my friend. He was in the back.”
The rescue
It was a half hour before Ritsco’s friend woke up and he couldn’t find his phone, while Ritsco was so badly hurt he couldn’t pick his up.
“It’s such a small highway that it’s not travelled very often and we were trapped for about 45 minutes before anybody came down the highway,” says Ritsco.
The first person to come by stopped, called police and then helped get Ritsco’s son out of the truck, smashing the window with a trailer hitch.
It took another hour for help to arrive, with Ritsco trapped in the truck the whole time.
When rescuers arrived, they had to work at getting Ritsco out: His foot had gone through the floor of the truck, the mangled metal wrapped around it.
STARS had landed to take Ritsco to hospital and he was being prepared in an ambulance but that plan was about to change.
“Then they came to the ambulance and said my son collapsed on the highway and his eyes rolled back in his head,” remembers Ritsco, tears rolling down his cheeks. “So I said, ‘Well, get him out of here with STARS.’ ”
The helicopter took off and Ritsco and his friend were taken to the hospital in Yorkton. Eventually the two were taken to Regina and arrived about six hours later.
That’s when Ritsco was told that things hadn’t gone well with his son.
“He stopped breathing in the helicopter on the way back to Regina and they had to emergency land in Fort Qu’Appelle to revive him and bring him back to life … and then he went into a coma,” says Ritsco.
The boy came out of the coma after a couple of days but had sustained massive head trauma.
Serious injuries
All three of the occupants of the truck were seriously hurt.
Ritsco’s friend had a broken hip with the other dislocated, along with a shoulder injury and nerve damage in one of his feet.
Ritsco had been driving and his list of injuries stretches on: He had a broken vertebra in his neck and a broken sternum, his right arm was almost detached at the elbow, and the foot that had gone through the floor of the truck was completely shattered.
“That was three years ago and I still have a broken foot,” says Ritsco.
The bones in Ritsco’s foot were broken into more than 200 pieces, most of which are so small his doctors have told him they really can’t be put back together.
“(The surgeon) said in all his career he has never seen a worse break in a foot or my elbow. Those are the two worst damages that he’s seen in his career,” recalls Ritsco.
Ritsco’s son had serious issues with lights and sound for a while after the crash and Ritsco says he had to relearn some things like riding a bike.
The boy is doing better now but is often worried — Ritsco says he likes to keep weapons in his room to defend himself — because they believe the other driver in the crash caused it on purpose.
“(The boy) doesn’t know if somebody’s going to come to the house and try to hurt him again,” Ritsco says.
Ritsco says the RCMP confirmed the crash was intentional on the part of the other driver, but the police wouldn’t confirm that. SGI also wouldn’t talk about the case.
Dealing with insurance
Ritsco still can’t work but, given his work before the crash, he’s getting the maximum benefits from SGI for income replacement. However, it hasn’t been smooth sailing with SGI.
The boy’s mother had to take time off work to care for their son after he got out of the hospital, but Ritsco says SGI wouldn’t provides benefits for that until he went to the media.
He’s also now having trouble with the insurance company giving him what Ritsco feels is a much-too-low offer on his suit for economic loss.
The big sticking point for Ritsco, though, is pain and suffering compensation.
Under SGI’s no-fault insurance, which is what most people in the province have, a person could sue the other driver for pain and suffering compensation up to $200,000, but only if the at-fault driver was impaired, negligent in some way or caused the crash intentionally. The other requirement is that the person be found guilty in court of that crime.
In Ritsco’s case, the other driver died in the crash, so no criminal charges were ever filed, which means Ritsco is ineligible to sue.
When Ritsco tried to contest the situation with SGI, he says the company told him its hands were tied because that’s the way the legislation is written.
Taking it to government
Ritsco has tried to talk to multiple ministers in charge of SGI, and while they’ve heard him out, they haven’t done anything to make changes.
Don Morgan is currently Saskatchewan’s minister responsible for SGI. He explains that, when the legislation for no-fault insurance was created in the early 2000s, it was explicitly created to have all kinds of benefits victims could draw on, but not anything for pain and suffering.
“That was a conscious decision when the legislation was drafted that they wanted to focus on comprehensive and specific items that were in the legislation,” Morgan says.
There is the possibility of suing for additional compensation, like the clause around pain and suffering compensation, but Morgan says that’s apart from any regular benefits.
“It’s not done as a benefit to the person that’s the victim. It’s there as a deterrent to the person that might be driving while impaired,” says Morgan.
So, Morgan says, if the at-fault person died, there would be no deterrent involved in taking them to court.
“In other jurisdictions where they don’t have no-fault, where it’s a tort system, people end up in court when they’ve had an accident. They argue who’s at fault, who’s not at fault for a momentary lapse of attention (or) somebody may be financially crippled forever,” says Morgan.
The minister believes most drivers in the province like the no-fault system, and so there are no current plans to make any changes around pain and suffering.
It’s the same kind of explanation Ritsco has got before and it’s not good enough for him.
Ritsco believes this is the worst the situation could be because the person, he believes, set out to hurt them.
“This is the definition of pain and suffering, physically and mentally,” he says.
For Ritsco, it’s not about the money.
“It’s the principle about it. The fact of them admitting that this exists, but for them to respond and say, ‘That’s not the way the legislation’s written,’ well, that’s what I’m trying to do is get the legislation changed for another person in the future that may need it more than us,” he says.
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