Around midnight on December 15, a vehicle carrying two men went into Lake Simcoe off Line 7 South in the Township of Oro-Medonte, Ont. Witnesses who saw the accident contacted emergency services.
Members of the Ontario Provincial Police’s (OPP) Orillia detachment, the Oro-Medonte fire department, the Barrie fire department, and paramedics from the County of Simcoe arrived on the scene. Members of the public had managed to free one man from the vehicle, but the second man remained trapped inside.
According to Const. Brett Boniface, the water in that section of Lake Simcoe is relatively shallow, approximately 1.5 metres in depth, but was still deep enough to submerge most of the vehicle. Emergency services eventually managed to free the second man from the vehicle and began administering first aid. Neither man was in the water for a prolonged time, Boniface said.
Both men were eventually transferred to a local hospital. The man who was freed from the vehicle first is from Mississauga and suffered non-life-threatening injuries. The second man, who was from Smith Falls, died in the hospital. The coroner has yet to release the cause of death.
OPP were scant on details and couldn’t answer what caused the accident because their investigation is ongoing. “Our technical collision investigators attended the scene and they have conducted their side of the investigation,” Boniface said. “Their reports take some time to come back because there’s a lot of calculations. They’re completing that currently.”
There’s also no word on where the men were coming from or where they were going. Members of Barrie’s fire department launched a drone to sweep the area for other possible occupants of the passenger vehicle but didn’t find anyone.
Boniface said that the vehicle has since been removed from the water and that more details will be released once the investigation is complete. The OPP asks that anyone who witnessed the accident or has dash cam footage and hasn’t spoken to the police, contact the Orillia detachment at 705-326-3536 or 1-888-310-1122.
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