Killer lorry driver walks free after a 2nd horror crash
A LORRY driver who killed a children’s author has been spared jail after crashing into another car, badly injuring a motorist.
Cary Gordon, 58, ploughed into a stranded Mercedes last year while he was looking at Google Maps on his mobile phone. The car driver suffered a broken spine.
Eight years ago, he was jailed after crashing into a car driven by author Christopher Alderton on another dual carriageway.
Yesterday Mr Alderton’s heartbroken mother told of her horror after learning that Gordon had walked free from court following his latest crash.
In January 2011, Gordon, who was driving a recovery truck, piled into the author’s Nissan Micra at a junction on the A24 at Dial Post in West Sussex. Mr Alderton, 30, from Suffolk, suffered catastrophic head injuries and died a week later. He had just finished a children’s book he had spent three years writing.
In 2012, at Hove Crown Court, Gordon was sentenced to six months in prison after admitting causing death by careless driving. He was also banned from driving for 12 months. Mr Alderton’s mother Brenda, 81, later published his book As The Balloon Blows By as a tribute to him after commissioning an illustrator and working with her three daughters to put it together.
Yesterday she said: ‘I’m absolutely horrified that he has done this again. He pulled out into the dual carriageway and my poor boy never stood a chance. He ploughed straight into him. It was horrendous. I lost my only son and it was not his fault.
‘When the driver was in court, his wife was crying and he only went to jail for a few months.
‘How could someone do this again, you would have thought he would be so careful on the road after that. How has he got a job back as a lorry driver? Who employed him given his history? It’s unbelievable that he hasn’t gone to jail this time.’
Oxford Crown Court heard that, in the latest incident, Gordon, from Worthing, West Sussex, was distracted by his phone and did not see the broken-down car until it was too late. Footage from inside the cab of his lorry captured him glancing down at his handset as he approached the car at speed on A34 at Abingdon in Oxfordshire. His lorry reduced it to a mangled wreck before coming off the road and crashing into bushes.
The driver, in her 50s, is still recovering from the crash on August 5 last year which left her with a spinal fracture in her neck, and cuts and bruises on her arms and legs. She had to have months of rehabilitation and suffers sleeplessness and headaches.
Despite his record for careless driving, Gordon was spared jail last week after pleading guilty to dangerous driving. Instead, he received a 14month suspended sentence and was ordered to do 150 hours of community service. He was also banned from driving for two years.
Yesterday it emerged that Gordon had his original six-month sentence reduced on appeal to just 16 weeks and successfully argued for the requirement for him to sit a retest to be dropped. This meant he was free to get another job as a lorry driver.