Tour van driver’s nap fatal for Polish tourist
Simon Dixon should have been feeling refreshed as he drove a group of nine Polish tourists along Happy Valley Road on the South Island’s West Coast. Instead, he was exhausted. So exhausted he fell asleep as he was driving, sending his van veering off the road and into a deep ditch.
Six of his nine passengers were injured and one – 47-yearold Iwona Porawska-Hyjek – was killed by the impact.
Simon Richard Dixon, 57, was charged with careless driving causing injury – a charge to which he pleaded guilty. He was sentenced in the Hamilton District Court on Tuesday.
As the court heard, it was one of the requirements of the passenger class driver’s licence Dixon held that he take a continuous 24-hour break from any kind of work after accumulating 70 hours of driving time.
The day before the fatal crash – at
2.10pm on November 16 last year – he did take a break from driving. But not from his duties as a tour guide.
‘‘You were required to be off work completely. However that was not the case,’’ Judge Robert Spear said, shortly before fining Dixon $1000, disqualifying him from driving for a year, and ordering him to pay $5000 in reparation to the husband of the woman he killed.
‘‘You remained with the tour group . . . as a tour guide. You came back and took over driving when you were tired . . . Exactly why you were tired was anyone’s guess.’’
Police prosecutor Sergeant Murray McDonald said Dixon had a higher duty of care to his passengers and other road users than most drivers, and this elevated his culpability.
Dixon had been eating snacks in a failed effort to push through his fatigue and had effectively ignored all the warning signs before he drifted off, McDonald said.
Making his situation worse, he had also been charged with making a false statement in a vehicle logbook and producing a logbook that did not contain clearly legible information.
Dixon’s counsel Thomas Sutcliffe said his client was deeply remorseful and had done everything in his power to help the victims of the crash after it happened, including calling emergency services and helping guide a rescue helicopter to their location, about midway between Hokitika and the Fox Glacier.
Driving passengers around was not Dixon’s usual line of work. His work usually involved taking groups on the Tongariro Crossing and river expeditions by raft and canoe.
He had agreed to drive the group as a favour to a friend at relatively short notice.
‘‘It was not a common job for him
. . . He has done all he could to put right what has happened. He feels terrible about it.’’
Dixon was due to soon leave New Zealand for a new life as a tour guide in Canada, and had been forced to delay his wedding to a Canadian woman because of his court obligations.
Sutcliffe had also furnished the court with a letter from the victim’s husband, who said he bore Dixon no malice and the crash was an accident that could have happened to anyone.
The judge was also provided with another letter from another member of the touring group, who wrote that Dixon was ‘‘a good man’’ who had behaved responsibly and diligently as he could after the crash, and genuinely cared about them.
Judge Spear said a prosecution request for Dixon to receive a sentence of community detention would be a step too far.
‘‘Accidents happen. Even the best and most attentive drivers can not rule out an accident some time in their career.
‘‘Unquestionably you were at fault, and that is a lesson to us all.’’
The crash was one of 32 fatal vehicle accidents in 2017 in which driver fatigue was a factor.