On April 28, drunk driving killer Marco Muzzo will make another bid for early release from the minimum-security prison where he’s serving his 10-year sentence for a crash that killed three children and their grandfather in 2015.
It’s hard to imagine the heir to a billion-dollar construction empire won’t be successful this second time around — not when he’ll have served almost half of his sentence.
As unfair as it may seem, that’s considered a long time for a first offender — even for a horrific crime we will never forget.
On that bright Sunday afternoon of Sept. 27, 2015, Muzzo had just flown home on a private jet from his bachelor party in Miami when he got into his Jeep and headed to King City with almost three times the legal limit of alcohol in his system.
His poor victims didn’t stand a chance.
Muzzo, 29 at the time, blew through a stop sign and T-boned a family minivan at the intersection of Kirby Rd. and Kipling Ave. — north of Kleinburg — killing driver Gary Neville, 65, and grandchildren Daniel Neville-Lake, 9, brother Harrison, 5, and sister Milagros, 2.
The children’s mother, Jennifer Neville-Lake, had to learn her entire world had just been destroyed when she saw her van’s twisted metal on the news.
To his credit, Muzzo never tried to evade responsibility or even seek bail. He pleaded guilty and didn’t appeal his 10-year jail term, believed to be the stiffest on record for impaired driving causing death.
So how much time is enough time?
Whatever it is, it’s certainly not the scant three years that he had served when Muzzo first applied for day and full parole in November 2018.
The board took just 20 minutes to deny his release. No one questioned Muzzo’s remorse but rather his lack of insight into his issues with alcohol.
Insisting the tragedy was an isolated incident and he didn’t need alcohol counselling, Muzzo then stunned the parole hearing when he said he’d need to consume eight or nine drinks before considering himself too impaired to drive.
And for the first time, Muzzo had disclosed that three years before the crash, he’d been jailed briefly for public intoxication after being denied entry to a Vaughan strip club: When arrested, he was “belligerent and rude” to police and tried to kick out the cruiser windows.
No, he still didn’t get it.
“It would seem you were trying to present yourself as a modest and responsible drinker who had simply made a terrible mistake on the day of the fatal decision,” the two-member panel said in its written decision.
“In the board’s view, you intentionally failed to disclose key information as you were hoping to paint yourself in a better light. In reality, you were simply impeding the progress you might have otherwise made.”
Muzzo isn’t likely to make that mistake again come April. A year and a half will have passed since he was last before the parole board and you can be sure he’s been doing all the alcohol abuse counselling he can find.
Not surprisingly, Neville-Lake believes he’s yet to pay his debt to society.
On her Facebook page, she’s asked her many supporters to write the parole board to oppose Muzzo’s release: “I am asking if you would share your stories with the Parole Board and Corrections Canada about how my family’s chapter in impaired driving has affected and changed you,” she wrote. “Please tell them if you are afraid of what the offender represents or may do if he is released and comes back into your community.”
An online petition opposing Muzzo’s parole has garnered more than 27,000 signatures.
But Muzzo has been eligible for full parole since May 2019. Assuming he’s now done the necessary counselling and can convince the parole board that he now has insight into his problems that he didn’t have before, there’s little chance he won’t be set free.
He will get his second chance. While the mother and daughter of his victims will not.
As Neville-Lake wrote in her heartbreaking victim impact statement at his first hearing: “I don’t get parole from this life sentence of misery and despair.”
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