DRUG-DRIVER JAILED
FATAL SMASH: Ex-footballer locked up for more than 10 years over horror collision
A REPEAT drug-driver with an appalling driving history who injected ice before causing a head-on smash that killed a 76-year-old grandmother and seriously injured her husband has been jailed for more than 10 years.
Former Anakie footballer Justin Robert Tate, 45, was on bail and unlicensed when he got behind the wheel and veered into a car carrying Meredith couple Gleeda Hooper and Peter Hooper, 81.
The County Court heard on Thursday that the Hoopers were driving to lunch about 12.40pm on January 28, 2019, when Tate careered his car into them at 70km/h on De Motts Road, Anakie.
Tate’s drug reading was so high more than two hours after the crash, an expert toxicologist opined he likely consumed “3-10” times more ice than what the average drug user takes to get high, the court heard.
County Court judge Gerard Mullaly said the crash had a devastating impact on Mr Hooper, who was left with serious chest fractures and needed prolonged rehabilitation.
Judge Mullaly said Mr Hooper was his wife’s carer, and in the months after the crash he had felt as though he was useless.
“He’s been married for many, many years and now feels loneliness very strongly,” Judge Mullaly said. “He is not the same man that he was.”
The court heard Ms Hooper’s daughter had to say goodbye to her mother on the side of the road following the crash, and that the family was devastated by the loss of their matriarch, considered the “glue” that held the family together.
Tate, sentenced to a minimum seven years and six months, contested the police finding that he was drug-affected at the time of the crash.
Judge Mullaly said it was “fanciful” to propose Tate consumed drugs in the seconds after the crash that left him dazed and with spinal injuries.
“The scenario that you swallowed methylamphetamine in the 60 to 90 seconds before (a member of the public) arrived (at the scene is) not a … reasonable one. It is fanciful in my view,” he said.
The court heard Tate’s woeful driving record included 74 infringements from 1995- 2015, and three drug-driving convictions before the fatal crash.
Tate pleaded guilty to culpable driving causing death, negligently causing serious injury and unlicensed driving.
The court was told he expressed “genuine” remorse to the Hooper family following the collision.
Judge Mullaly described the crime as “needless, avoidable and dreadful.”
“You were drug-affected and you shouldn’t have been driving at all. You were not able to simply keep your car in your lane,” he said.
Tate has served 699 days on remand and will be disqualified from driving for five years when he is released from jail.