The criminal trial of Bahaa Ali has reached the end of its evidence and final submissions by the crown and defense have also been completed. The verdict of Justice Barbara MacFarlane will reportedly be handed down on February 3, 2026.
The bazaar reports about this collision were previously discussed in a Gorski Consulting website article of October 11, 2025.
For those not following the calamity, this collision involved the death of 68-year-old, Joan Clubb, who was a passenger in a Hyundai car when it was struck in its right side by the front end of an eastbound Mercedes that was travelling on Southdale Road at the intersection with White Oak Road in London, Ontario, on November 3, 2020. The alleged driver of the Mercedes, Bahaa Ali, was charged with dangerous driving causing death. For an unexplained reason the trial of this matter did not take place until almost five years had passed. Clubb was reportedly alert after the collision and communicated with paramedics but then, without explanation, died.
The wording used by CTV news media to describe the events is perplexing. News media reported that “hours later” police took a closer look into the crash. “Eventually” police charged Ali with dangerous driving.
Police took a closer look hours later? What does that mean? Did they not look closely at the collision in the typical time frame that police conduct an investigation? And what does the word “eventually” mean? Did it take a “more than typical” delay before those charges were laid? And where did news media get this information about these delays? Were explanations given at trial? None of this has reached the public.
The base of the discussions centre around Bahaa Ali claiming that he was not the driver of the Mercedes. He claimed that he received a telephone call from his brother Muhannad that he was involved in a collision and Bahaa rushed to the site before police arrived. He then tricked police by claiming he was the driver. And this is the type of “he said this and they said that” kind of evidence that permeates the proceedings. While the testimony of the two brothers may be difficult to believe, the manner in which the police investigation unfolded is also difficult to comprehend.
This may be the manner in which news media have decided to approach the reporting by relying exclusively on what witnesses said. Anyone with any serious knowledge of collision reconstruction would understand that reliance on witness information is the last place to go as it can be unreliable. At no point have the CTV news reports identified the key, objective, evidence and investigative procedures that should have unfolded in a proper police investigation. This may be because the news reporters did not understand the technical evidence, but this cannot be unraveled without further disclosure.
There seems to be a continual reliance on imprecise terms in descriptions of evidence. As an example, the only technical analysis discussed in the case is that a crown video expert used some unexplained procedure to determine that the Mercedes was travelling at 129 km/h “as the Mercedes approached the intersection”. But that comment is very imprecise. Where was the Mercedes, specifically, when the analyst determined its speed? Because it is the specific location that is obviously important. It is obviously important because the damage on the two vehicles does not support that the Mercedes was travelling anywhere near 129 km/h when the impact occurred.
Since the damage evidence does not support an impact speed of 129 km/h, what does the objective evidence reveal about the actual impact speed? As was indicated in the initial Gorski Consulting website article of October 11, 2025, there should have been procedures initiated to determine that impact speed. The most obvious procedure in modern times is to conduct a download of the event data contained in the Mercedes event data recorder. This is a standard procedure in police investigations. Was such a download conducted? Either no, or the news media failed to properly inform the public that such data was obtained. Secondly, if such event data was not downloaded, or could not be downloaded, then the next option should have been to proceed with standard analyses that have been conducted for decades before event data was available. Those procedures involve a calculation of the momentum and kinetic energy of the collision.
From the momentum side, measurements should have been gathered to determine the precise distance that each vehicle travelled, how much resistance to that travel was created by matters such as sliding wheels or scraping metal on the pavement, or projecting over a curb. The angle of departure from impact by each vehicle would also be a required determination. Information such as the weight (mass) of each vehicle would be needed. Once such data is collected the momentum analysis can be performed as simply as using only a pencil, a sheet of paper, an engineer’s scale and a protractor. Using such simple instruments a graphic display of the momentum analysis is created. This can also be done using trigonometry. However most professional collision reconstructionists would use some kind of computer program for this analysis.
From the kinetic energy side the crush of each vehicle would need to be measured and data about the stiffness of the structures would be required. Information about the overlap of the two damage zones would need to be determined. This crush analysis is possible to do through hand calculations but it is tedious and ripe for error. That is why the analysis is often done using a computer reconstruction program such as CRASH.
Combining the analysis of momentum and energy, we can be assured that, when the momentum methods are performed correctly, they will result in a calculated change-in-velocity that is identical to what is calculated in the energy analysis. That is one of the ways in which we confirm that all has been done properly.
So, did police obtain the event data? And if not, did they conduct the momentum and energy analyses mentioned above? If they did this work properly they could have realized that the Mercedes was not travelling anywhere near the speed of 129 km/h at impact and that should have been revealed at trial. However, what was the judge provided for her consideration? Was the judge actually told that the physical evidence does not support a speed of 129 km/h at impact?
The reported bazaar proceedings continue with respect to collision severity and injury. We previously indicated that the collision severity was not sufficient to cause the death of the female passenger in the Hyundai. But even more strangely, nothing seemed to be determined by the police about what injuries should have occurred to a driver of the Mercedes and whether those injuries, or non-injuries were consistent with the observations of Bahaa Ali. If the Mercedes was indeed travelling at 129 km/h at impact what would be the severity of the change-in-velocity and what injuries should the driver have sustained?
And here is the other point: injury is not related to travel speed, it is related to change in travel speed, or change-in-velocity. Travel speed may have nothing to do with injury, expect that it has the potential of creating a collision severity that causes injury. Because at a higher travel speed the vehicle and occupant possess more kinetic energy which is dissipated in a collision. But the same collision severity could take place at a travel speed of 50 km/h as it would at 100 km/h.
The bazaar happenings of the internet is that a lot of misinformation is spread like a wild fire. So many “experts” have been given the stage to claim that a heightened travel speed is dangerous and they go on to explain that, at a 50 km/h travel speed an occupant is expected to sustain a certain level of injury, and at a 60 km/h travel speed that occupant is expected to sustain an even higher severity of injury. All this is bogus, unscientific, misinformation. Travel speed has never been reliably related to injury. If this was true agencies such as NHTSA and Transport Canada would never have pursued attempts at detailing the change-in-velocity in a collision. Yet investigators at NHTSA and Transport Canada have performed such work for decades.
Occupant injury occurs when a vehicle sustains a change in its motion over a short time, not just because it is travelling at a constant, high speed.
In the late 1600s Sir Isaac Newton formulized his Three Laws of motion. The Third law expressed the concept that “for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction”. For the purposes of the present collision, when the Mercedes struck the Hyundai, the force exerted on the Hyundai was also equal and opposite to the force exerted on the Mercedes. If the force on the Hyundai was “tremendous” then the force on the Mercedes would also have to be “tremendous”. If there was sufficient force to cause the death of the Hyundai passenger should there also have been sufficient force to cause injury to the driver of the Mercedes? Barring the issue of lacking vehicle structure in a side impact of the Hyundai, what kind of injury should be expected to the driver of the Mercedes? No observable injury at all? NHTSA has provided objective answers to such questions from detailed studies as far back as 1979 in its NASS program. By the time NASS was finally replaced by the CISS program, well over 140,000 real-life collisions were documented and these cases could be accessed through the NHTSA website. Those cases contained details of change-in-velocity to involved vehicles and the resultant injuries sustained. Similar access is still possible in the CISS program. So if an analyst was not certain about how injuries were created or at what collision severity, one only needed to examine the NASS or CISS program cases. Was anyone in the current trial aware of this capability? Again, who knows?
The trial appears to have been focused on this debate about who was the driver. And this debate has been reported as a reliance on what witnesses have said and not on the objective evidence that would typically be obtained from a properly conducted investigation. There are well-known methods available for determining who was inside a vehicle when a collision occurred. For example, in the case of a driver, an examination of a deployed air bag can find DNA from the occupant. And patterns of injury would be created and these could be matched to contacts made with the vehicle interior. Clothing fibers can be gathered and compared to the clothing worn by an occupant. Restraint (seat-belt) systems can be examined for evidence of how the system was loaded and therefore what injuries could have occurred to that occupant. The most obvious fact is that when a shoulder belt is loaded it will create a narrow band of bruising on the left collarbone area of the driver, while that bruise will be on the right collarbone of a right-front occupant. It is such basic information that would be known to a collision reconstructionist who is familiar with the the physical evidence available in motor vehicle collisions. So the issue of who was the driver should not have been about what witnesses observed. It should have stemmed from evidence gathered by police in a proper investigation.
Nothing was said about whether the defendants retained an expert to counter the crown’s evidence, as little as the objective evidence was. And here lies another difficulty in our current criminal justice system. If you are rich and powerful you can hire lawyers, many lawyers if you wish. And you can also hire many experts to write and testify about all the good things you are. But if you a common labourer of the street you are out of luck. Lawyers cost thousands of dollars. Police documents cost thousands of dollars. And experts cost thousands of dollars. If you are a common bloke what is the likelihood that someone will uncover evidence to support you even when that evidence exists? As the saying goes: “slim or none, and slim just left town”.
Not unexpectedly the reporting of the lawyers’ closing arguments was full of, you guessed it, arguments. Not a single thread of useful evidence was contained in those reported arguments. The work of the crown’s video expert might have been correct but did anyone with any expertise actually review the work? Did anyone with any expertise report to the court about how speeds and general collision reconstruction matters are analyzed? Did anyone testify about injury and collision severity? What will the judge do when its comes to examining the question of high travel speed and injury? If Bahaa Ali exhibited no external indications of injury did police not scratch their heads and develop a thought cloud: “Hmm, 129 km/h and no injury, am I missing something here?” Will the judge similarly dismiss such as thought and move to other issues?
Indeed these are bazaar proceedings.
You must be logged in to post a comment.