MANDEL: Friend of accused denies driving boat in deadly crash

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It’s the stuff of a TV courtroom drama.

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It turns out the man being served up by the defence as the real driver involved in a fatal Lake Ontario crash has a criminal record that includes dangerous operation of a vessel.

That shocking revelation of Eddie Denkha’s purged record was only recently discovered by a private detective working for lawyer Alan Gold, who is representing Filip Grkovski, who has pleaded not guilty at his judge-alone trial to numerous charges including two counts of criminal negligence causing death and two counts of impaired operation causing death stemming from the horrific pleasure boat crash on May 31, 2022.

Passengers Megan Wu, 24, of Newmarket, and Julio Abrantes, 34, of Richmond Hill, drowned after the 30-ft. craft hit a rock breakwall and flipped near Tommy Thompson Park. Eight others, including Denkha and Grkovski, survived.

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“What are the odds?” Gold told Superior Court Justice Tamara Sugunasiri, barely containing his excitement. “We’re saying this is the man who was driving and the defence discovered it, the police don’t discover it.”

Crown attorneys Jordan Howard and Jackson Foreman told the judge no one was aware of Denkha’s previous convictions, including assault and living off the avails, because they were purged from the police database in 2020 after he successfully obtained a criminal record suspension two years earlier.

Now that it’s been discovered, prosecutors wanted to present his record and ask Denkha about it during his examination-in-chief. The defence wanted to spring it on him.

In the end, the judge allowed the Crown to only ask Denkha if he had a criminal record – which he denied. When asked if he’d ever been charged with a criminal offence, he hesitated: “Maybe 20 years ago. Or 30. I’m not sure.”

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That’s as far as Howard was permitted to go on the criminal record Denkha never disclosed. So Gold will get his Perry Mason moment when he cross-examines his proposed alternate suspect on Monday on his buried past.

In the meantime, Denkha tried his best to place the blame for the tragedy squarely on his friend.

Grkovski invited him on his boat and together with about eight other people, they spent the late afternoon into the night at a “tie-up” with other boats on the lake, partying, listening to music and socializing, he testified.

Everyone was drinking and he himself had about six drinks.

Grkovski was drinking and also doing cocaine, Denkha testified.

A forensic scientist has testified that in her opinion, Grkovski would have been impaired at the time of the crash after blood samples showed he would have had blood alcohol concentration of between 85 to 90 mg of alcohol in 100 ml of blood to as high as 154-159 mg alcohol in 100 ml of blood. She also found he’d ingested cocaine “in the last day or two.”

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Both Grkovski and Denkha are seen on brief Snapchat videos behind the wheel of the boat as they left the tie-up and headed back to the marina, but the witness insisted it was Grkovski at the controls when they crashed and flipped over.

Denkha said Grkovski asked him to keep a lookout while he went down for a moment to his angry girlfriend, but he refused, saying he didn’t want to take responsibility in open water, so his friend put the boat in neutral.

When he came back, he said Grkovski was fuming, “like his eyes were were going to pop out from his skull” and he suddenly “floored” it.

“I told him, ‘Slow down,’” he recalled, “‘You’re going too fast.’”

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And then after “a bang to the left, a bang to the right,” they capsized. Trapped under the boat, gasping for air and swallowing gas-laced water, Denkha said he saw Abrantes and told him they had to get out. He told him he can’t.

“I’m not dying like this,” Denkha recalled thinking.

After managing to find an opening and swimming to shore, he saw Grkovski.

“I said, ‘Make sure that nobody dies here,’” Denkha testified.

And almost immediately, he recalled, the finger pointing began.

“He started having tears in his eyes and a couple of minutes later, they were trying to accuse me that it was me who was operating,” Denkha said.

Allegations that can be expected to continue when Denkha is cross-examined Monday.

mmandel@postmedia.com

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