Glance at phone leads to ‘lifelong penalty’
Kim Crous was driving her children to a play date when a momentary glance at her phone cost her son his life and left two families devastated.
Crous cried in the dock of Napier District Court yesterday as her lawyer, Scott Jefferson, told Judge Geoff Rea she was ‘‘shattered by her own actions’’.
Judge Rea agreed, saying any sentence he imposed would be insignificant compared with the ‘‘lifelong penalty’’ she was facing as a result of losing her son.
The Hastings mother made the fatal mistake in April of checking Google Maps when asked by her children how far they were from their friend’s house.
Driving along the Hawke’s Bay expressway at about 100kmh with phonein-hand, Crous missed seeing a long line of cars stopped for road works ahead of her.
She ploughed into the vehicle at the back of the queue.
The crash killed her 8-year-old son, James, and injured his 5-year-old sister. An 11-year-old in the other vehicle was also injured. Everyone was wearing seatbelts.
At an earlier court appearance, she pleaded guilty to a charge of careless driving causing death and two counts of careless driving causing injury.
Yesterday, Jefferson described Crous’ actions as ‘‘a moment’s inadvertence in an otherwise blame-free existence’’ to date. Crous was a dedicated mother and a ‘‘fully contributing member of society’’ whose family left South Africa so they could have a better life in this country, Jefferson said.
The crash also changed the lives of the family in the other car.
In a victim impact statement read to the court, the driver recounted her horror at seeing Crous’ car approach, and telling her children to hold on because she realised it would not stop in time.
She continued to suffer from anxiety and panic attacks, which had woken her up at night since the incident, she said.
It prompted her and her husband to abandon a sharemilking contract and leave Hawke’s Bay.
A recent return trip to the crash scene brought back traumatic memories. In the statement, she expressed her sadness over James’ death: ‘‘I think you, Kim, have suffered enough.’’
Police declined to make any submissions at the sentencing.
Judge Rea said cases such as this were among the hardest sentencing exercises the judiciary had to deal with, in which a ‘‘low level of fault’’ resulted in an ‘‘horrendous’’ outcome. Hand-held phone use by drivers was illegal, and authorities worked hard to push that message to avoid the type of ‘‘catastrophic result’’ that occurred in this case, he said.
The judge ordered Crous to undergo six months of supervision and disqualified her from driving for a year. The supervision sentence should be used to offer Crous any help she needed, he said.