2 drivers dodge jail over crash that killed Scots gran
THE family of a grandmother who died when she was hit by car that had mounted the pavement reacted with fury yesterday after the two drivers involved were spared jail.
Kathleen Donald, 73, of the Isle of Cumbrae, was visiting Liverpool when the accident happened in March last year.
She died after being knocked down by a Vauxhall Meriva driven by charity worker John Wickham.
Liverpool Crown Court heard that the 76-year-old lost control of the car after it collided with a Seat Leon driven by Maria Bircakova.
Bircakova, a 38-year-old banker, had swerved from the outside lane of the road after missing her turning, hitting Wickham’s car. He then panicked and pressed the accelerator instead of the brake.
The Vauxhall mounted the pavement and struck Mrs Donald, who became trapped under its wheels. Passers-by managed to lift the car off her, but she died in hospital three hours later.
Her daughter Joy, 52, who had accompanied her mother to Liverpool from Cumbrae, in the Firth of Clyde, was knocked unconscious.
Bircakova, of Watford, Hertfordshire, was last month cleared of causing death by dangerous driving
‘Dangerous situation’
but was convicted of the lesser offence of dangerous driving.
She was sentenced yesterday to nine months imprisonment suspended for 12 months. The banker, who moved from Slovakia in 2003, was ordered to carry out 180 hours of unpaid work and banned from driving for three years. Judge Neil Flewitt told Bircakova: ‘Although you cannot be held legally responsible for Kathleen Donald’s death, you bear some moral responsibility because you created the dangerous situation which triggered the chain of events which led to her death.’
Wickham, of Knowsley, Merseyside, denied causing death by careless driving but was found guilty at an earlier trial. He was given a 12-month community order and a two-year driving ban.
In a moving impact statement read by Mrs Donald’s daughter Eileen Barr, her family said: ‘Our mum deserved to die in her bed of old age surrounded by people who loved her – not on pavement in a strange city as a result of the reckless and dangerous actions of another human being.
‘No punishment can adequately fit the crime of causing the death of our mum and injury to our sister, but what [we] wished for was the feeling that the parties responsible would accept both responsibility for their actions and the consequences of those actions. We feel this hasn’t been the case.’
Judge Flewitt told the two drivers that the victim’s three children had behaved with great dignity during the trial ‘as they waited – in vain – for either or both of you to accept some responsibility for their mother’s death’.