Lennox Island woman with impaired driving history pleads guilty for crash killing 2
CBC
A 22-year-old woman from Lennox Island has pleaded guilty to two charges of impaired driving causing death, eight months after a single vehicle crash killed her close childhood friend and a member of that friends’ family.
Angelina Marina Jacqueline Bernard appeared in Summerside provincial court in person Monday as her trial was scheduled to start. She wore a white sweater and dress pants with shackles at her wrists and ankles. Bernard has been in custody since her arrest last August.
The trial did not go ahead, instead, Bernard changed two of her prior not guilty pleas to guilty.
The court heard the facts for two separate incidents of impaired driving for which Bernard is now awaiting sentencing.
The first was four months before the deadly crash.
On February 19, 2025, someone called police to report that a video was posted online in which Bernard could be seen with an alcoholic beverage while driving.
RCMP were able to catch up with Bernard and caught her going 103 km/h on a route in the Lennox Island First Nation where the posted speed limit was 40 km/h.
Bernard admitted she had been drinking and then failed a roadside breathalyzer.
The facts read in court said she became irate when the officer tried to put her under arrest, but she was eventually taken to an RCMP detachment where she refused to provide a breath sample for the official screening device police would use to lay charges.
She pleaded guilty to charges of dangerous driving and refusing to comply with a breath demand in May 2025, but her sentencing was adjourned to July so a Gladue report could be prepared.
A Gladue is a type of presentence report for Indigenous offenders that looks at the specific harms caused to that person through the legacy of colonization and residential schools.
Refusing a breath demand carries many of the same penalties as impaired driving, including mandatory jail time and a one-year driving suspension. Bernard had a prior conviction for this same charge in 2023.
Because Bernard had not yet been sentenced for her February 2025 refusal charge, she was technically still able to drive on June 27 last year when her driving caused a single vehicle collision that killed her two passengers.
The court heard that on that day, Bernard was with her childhood close friend, Karissa-Jo Mary Elizabeth Bernard, 22, and Karissa’s uncle, Kevin Joseph Labobe, 54.
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