An Ottawa man is being hailed for doing his civic duty and another Ottawa man has been charged with drunk driving after dramatic video captured on a dash cam. 

The dash cam video was taken by Rocco Michelli who first noticed the white SUV on Friday morning near the Westgate Shopping Centre.  According to Michelli, he followed the driver for 20 minutes.  It started on Carling Avenue, then moved on the eastbound lanes of the 417 where the driver is seeing bouncing off barriers before finally exiting on Walkley road, where police were waiting.

Michelli was just heading to work early Friday morning, when he noticed some strange manuevers involving a car in front of him.  A little nagging voice told him to follow the driver to try to make sure he didn't end up killing someone.

Michelli is on the road all the time with his job and sees a lot of bad drivers.  But nothing compared to what he saw last Friday morning on his way to work.

“He just swiped the inner wall,” he says in the video posted on YouTube.

It was 6:45 a.m.  Michelli had first noticed the erratic driver at Carling and Merivale.

“After making a left turn on Carling Avenue,” Michelli recalls, “he hit a curb, twice and on the on-ramp behind me, he hit the curb again.  After he merged, he swerved into the middle lane and did a counter-steering maneuver to avoid hitting the car in the middle lane and that's when I picked up the phone.”

Michelli hit "record" on his dash cam then called 9-1-1, maintaining a safe distance behind the vehicle as it swerves into traffic and bumps into the Queensway barriers.

“He just hit the inner wall again,” he tells Ottawa police as he narrates what he sees, “He just side swiped it again.”

The video shows the driver cutting across lanes at the 174-417 split, swerving at the last minute to take the exit to continue onto the 417.

After twenty minutes of videotaping the driver, all the while talking to police, Michelli followed him to an area near Walkey and St. Laurent where police were waiting to arrest the man.

“There were enough vehicles on the roadway at that time,” says Sgt. Mark Gatien with the Traffic Enforcement Unit with the Ottawa Police, “that if he had caused an accident, he would have started a chain reaction, and that would have been devastating, to have one idiot on the road causing harm to everyone else.”

46-year -old Martin Simbauni of Ottawa has been charged with driving while his ability was impaired and driving over the limit.  According to Gatien, he blew two and a half times the legal limit.  As for Michelli, Gatien says he kept his cool and they appreciate his work.

“Kudos to this gentleman.  He did his civic duty.”

Gatien says this is one occasion when using a cellphone is permitted while driving, if you are alerting 9-1-1 about an emergency.  He says if a passenger is able to call for help and record events, that is safer for everyone involved. 

Rocco Michelli says following this individual, responding to a potential crisis was an instinct.

“I couldn't have lived with the fact that I had seen something on the news later that day, if a fatal accident would have happened for instance.  I couldn't live with myself so that’s why I followed him right to the end.”