Student who killed her sister in crash ‘to be spared jail because she’s suffered enough’
A UNIVERSITY student who killed her teenage sister in a car crash is likely to be spared jail because she has already suffered enough, a judge has said.
Meliha Kaya, 22, was driving over the 30mph limit when her Mini Cooper collided with a BMW and careered off the road, over a wall and into a tree.
Kaya’s 16-year-old sister Elif, a star A-level student who wanted to be a barrister, died at the scene in Woodford, east London, in February 2016.
But Judge Wendy Joseph QC told the Old Bailey that she was inclined to suspend a jail term because no sentence could ever repair the damage.
Elif had been sitting in the front passenger seat and was the only one of three in the car wearing a seatbelt.
Kaya, a criminology student at Middlesex University, received life-threatening injuries and needed plastic surgery to her face. She has been left with no memory of the accident.
A friend sitting in the back, Ayla Osman, was also seriously injured.
Kaya, of Woodford, admitted causing death by dangerous driving and causing serious injury by dangerous driving. Her fellow defendant Jordash Graham, 24, of Leytonstone, east London, admitted dangerous driving after speeding in his Ford Focus closely behind her before the collision.
The two drivers, who knew each other through friends, had just left a function at a nearby pub.
Judge Wendy Joseph QC told Kaya it was ‘humane’ to give her full credit for her guilty plea and said it would be
possible to suspend a jail term when she is sentenced tomorrow.
She added: ‘It seems to me that the injury which she has suffered, the physical injury she has recovered from, the injury she has inflicted on herself and her family, is one from which they can never recover.
‘There is no sentence I can impose which could begin to put it right.
‘There is nothing she can do that could ever put it right.’
The judge said she was concerned that the fact that Elif was the only person wearing a seatbelt in the car would send out the message that someone was safer by not wearing one.
But Julian Evans, prosecuting, said the part of the car where Elif was sitting had taken the brunt of the impact.