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Ministry of Labour inspectors pore over the collapsed stage at Downsview Park. Scott Johnson was killed when the stage collapsed prior to a Radiohead concert, June 17, 2012.The Globe and Mail

A few weeks past 40 years to the day that Scott Johnson came into the world, his father, Ken, sat in an Ontario courtroom, relaying as best he could to a full house of lawyers, journalists, Ontario’s Chief Coroner and the coroner’s inquest jury just what kind of man his only son had been.

Dressed in a black three-piece suit and sporting a bushel of white hair to match his beard, Mr. Johnson spoke in a shaky voice as pictures of Scott flashed on a screen. Scott took to swimming early, he told the room, and went quickly from viola to guitar to drums. He toured with Keane and the Killers and, eventually, Radiohead.

At this he paused. Seven years earlier, all those experiences led Scott Johnson, a drum technician for Radiohead, to Toronto’s Downsview Park – and to his untimely death at 33 when, as coroner’s council Prabhu Rajan described in his opening remarks, the stage roof “literally fell on top of him.”

“It saddens me to think I’ve squished Scott’s life down to a few pages,” his father said with a sigh.

Hours later, he stood outside the Coroner’s Office in North Toronto and assessed his statement.

“I’m clearly emotional about Scott,” he said. “But this needed to be done. And I needed to be here and to be seen to be here.”

In 2013, Mr. Johnson attended the criminal trial. Five years later, an Ontario judge stayed 10 charges under the provincial Occupational Health and Safety Act against the show’s promoter, Live Nation, engineer Domenic Cugliari and contractor Optex Staging, citing the Jordan ruling – a 2016 Supreme Court refinement of the right to a timely trial, effectively ending the Crown’s prosecution.

“It’s become a legal game,” Mr. Johnson said. He’d hoped to lobby to amend the Jordan ruling, to make sure what happened to Scott could not happen again. But to no avail. So here he was, having flown in from England, making the best of this mandatory inquest. “I don’t think Scott’s had justice. This isn’t about justice. It’s about improving procedures.”

The same can not be said for Scott’s mother, Sue, who refused to come to Canada and will not bear even the mention of Live Nation or Mr. Cugliari. “There’s nothing like the bond between a mother and a son, but those two had something very special,” Mr. Johnson explained.

The inquest, which got under way on Monday and is expected to last three weeks with as many as 25 witnesses, began with emotional testimony and ended the day with a technical breakdown of the Downsview Park stage and how it collapsed on June 16, 2012.

After opening statements by Chief Coroner David Cameron, in which he outlined to the jury the scope of the inquest, Mr. Rajan said: “Our view is that Scott should not have died, did not have to die, that his death was preventable.”

Mr. Johnson then took the stand, followed by piano tuner Wayne Ferguson and rigger Shannon Cogan, who recalled that he could see Scott turn around before being crushed by the roof.

In a prepared statement, Radiohead drummer Philip Selway said: “I’m outraged by the lack of justice, the lack of accountability and what I can only perceive to be a complete failure of the justice system."

Still, moments after the first day wrapped, Mr. Selway expressed his immense gratitude for being able to make his statement.

“It was our last chance to put on record how we feel. How we feel we’ve been let down and Ken and Sue have been let down by the process,” he said, clearly still shaken. “I was able to say what’s been important to us. To be able to express our frustrations and our anger at the way the case panned out. Today felt like there was the emotional impact.

“[Scott’s death] is something that everybody [in Radiohead] has had to repress,” he continued. “Once people start talking about it, you see how people are still traumatized.”

In his testimony, Mr. Selway reiterated much of what he previously told The Globe and Mail: that the band was shaken, considered calling it quits and that many members and crew still suffer from a form of PTSD.

Looking ahead to the end of the inquest, he said: “There will be reassurance, particularly if the recommendations the jury gives are implemented. That takes some of the sting out of it.

“But obviously it doesn’t ultimately change the fact that Scott was killed that day. That Ken and Sue have lost their only child. And as a group, I think everybody has been profoundly affected by it."

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