Driver ‘shattered me and my family’
A man has been found guilty of careless driving causing injury after crashing into journalist Karen Rutherford, killing her horse.
Chinese national Peng Wang, 28, was found guilty on Wednesday afternoon after a judge-alone trial at the North Shore District Court.
The verdict comes more than seven months after the crash happened on a 80kmh rural road in Dairy Flat, north of Auckland.
He will be sentenced in April.
On August 20, 2016, Rutherford and her 13-yearold daughter, Ella, were riding their two horses, Chico and Curious George, in a single file along the verge of Postman Rd.
Wang drove over a rise in the road and was travelling head on to the pair, Judge Jonathan Down said in his summing up.
Ella claimed she signalled for the car to slow down and move over.
But Wang, a husband and father of one, failed to do so.
Earlier in the trial, Rutherford described how the vehicle Wang was driving was going ‘‘like a bat out of hell’’ towards them.
He careened into Rutherford who was riding Curious George behind her daughter.
She smashed into the vehicle’s windscreen and was thrown metres into a ditch.
She suffered multiple broken bones, including a broken leg and a brain injury.
Curious George was so badly injured he had to be euthanised.
He was Ella’s much loved horse and it was by choice that day that Rutherford rode him.
The vehicle missed Ella as Chico was smaller than Curious George, Judge Down said.
Ella was uninjured but at first had feared her mother had died.
Residents on Postman Rd who witnessed the collision rushed to the scene before emergency services arrived.
Rutherford cried and she sternly addressed Wang through a victim impact statement.
‘‘You shattered me and my family like never before,’’ Rutherford said.
‘‘As I lay in the ditch and wondered where you were, you never came to help me.
‘‘What possessed you to drive like this, head-on into people with two horses.’’
With help of an interpreter, Wang maintained the horse Rutherford was riding ‘‘changed direction’’ and reared up on to his vehicle.
He also claimed he did not see any signal from the riders to slow down but said he had done so anyway and said he left about 50cm of space.
Wang claimed he took enough evasive action but did not want to cross the centre line as he believed it was ‘‘against the law’’.
He earlier admitted he did not read the New Zealand road rules when he came to the country.
But the prosecution argued that if Wang had read the road rules, he would have known there was an exception to cross the centre line when safe to do so and to avoid a collision.
Wang held a Chinese licence and said he was learning the road rules from driving experience with friends he was staying with.
Judge Down concluded that Wang was travelling faster than 45kmh and that 50cm of space was ‘‘inadequate and unsafe’’.
He also said if Wang had learned the New Zealand road rules he would have known there was an exception to cross the centre line when safe to do so and to avoid a collision.
He said Wang’s actions was at the ‘‘top end’’ of careless driving.
Rutherford later said the judge’s guilty verdict was a ‘‘shallow victory’’.
‘‘He killed a horse and he just about killed me,’’ she said.