Lorry driver who killed two men says ‘crash avoidable’
INQUEST INTO DEATHS ON SMART MOTORWAY
A HULL lorry driver who killed two men when his truck ploughed into their vehicles on a stretch of smart motorway has told an inquest he believes he would have avoided them if there had been a hard shoulder.
Jason Mercer, 44, and Alexandru Murgeanu, 22, died when a lorry driven by Prezemyslaw Szuba crashed into their vehicles after they stopped on a stretch of the M1 near Sheffield, an inquest into their deaths was told.
Szuba, 40, of Hull, was jailed for ten months in October last year after admitting causing the deaths of Mr Mercer and Mr Murgeanu by careless driving.
Answering questions over the phone from prison, Szuba told the hearing he accepted he was driving without paying proper attention, telling a coroner: “I have already accepted that at my trial.”
But he told the inquest: “If there had been a hard shoulder on this bit of motorway, the collision would have been avoidable.
“I would have driven past these two cars as it would be safer and they would have been able to come
home safely and I would be able to come back home.”
Szuba told the inquest at Sheffield Town Hall he had only three to five seconds to react, and asked if he would have avoided the crash if he had been paying attention, he said: “It’s difficult to say after everything now.”
He also confirmed that he had
no specific training in driving on a smart motorway.
Sergeant Mark Brady, who oversees major collision investigations for South Yorkshire Police, told the hearing: “Had there been a hard shoulder, had Jason and Alexandru pulled on to the hard shoulder, my opinion is that Mr Szuba would have driven clean past them.”
But Sgt Brady accepted that the primary cause of the crash was Szuba’s inattention to the road.
The hearing heard how the tragedy happened on June 7, 2019, after a slight collision between a Ford Focus driven by Mr Mercer, of Rotherham, South Yorkshire, and a Ford Transit driven by Mr Murgeanu, who was living in Mansfield, Nottinghamshire, but was originally from Romania.
The two vehicles stopped in lane one of the four-lane motorway just north of junction 34, on the northbound carriageway, and both men had got out of their vehicles.
Coroner David Urpeth was told the vehicles had been stationary for about six minutes when they were hit by Szuba’s Mercedes lorry, which was travelling at a speed-regulated 56mph.
Mr Mercer’s wife Claire, who has been a prominent campaigner against smart motorways since her husband’s death, watched proceedings in court with her legal team.