An incredible story, this one, from This is Lincolnshire.
Piotr Koch was a learner who had only had six driving lessons. He agreed to drive Diana Priede and her boyfriend from Boston to East Midlands Airport after her arranged driver let her down – a distance of 70 miles.
He had an hour in which to complete the journey.
If you wrote this as a script for a disaster movie or Casualty episode it would get thrown out for being too repetitive or unoriginal. You can guess what happened next.
Koch’s satnav shows that he was exceeding the speed limit for the whole of the 50% of the journey he had so far completed, and was averaging 80mph. At this point, Koch veered off the road on a bend, overreacted and spun across the road into a tree on the other side, and then rolled the car. Priede was killed and her boyfriend seriously injured. It doesn’t say what injuries Koch suffered.
Koch was driving on a provisional licence, had no insurance, no L plates, and was unsupervised. He had been stopped twice by police in the previous month for driving without a licence (for which he was fined each time).
He was jailed for three years and banned for six (I guess it was “only” three years because he admitted guilt).
I don’t want to sound unsympathetic – but I’m going to anyway. Diana Priede and her boyfriend are almost as guilty some ways (if they knew Koch was not fully licensed, of course). It is her attitude towards this sort of thing that makes people like Koch think that what they do is all right. Koch’s arrogance and stupidity are merely symptoms of the real problem.
Tragic, of course, but let’s not keep getting tied up with technical guilt. The real malady is much deeper than that, and although Koch might be technically guilty, anyone prepared to benefit from his lawbreaking must share some of the blame.