Tragic PC’sPage colleague: I wish he’d stayed in car

A POLICEMAN who died when he became caught in a car’s tow rope was not aware of a warning against leaving your patrol vehicle, a murder trial heard yesterday.

Andrew Shaw said his fellow constable Andrew Harper, 28, had his feet ‘whipped out from under him’ before he suffered fatal injuries being dragged a mile over country roads at 40mph. The two officers were trying to stop thieves towing off a £10,000 quad bike with a Seat Toledo.

Mr Shaw, who is an advanced driver with Thames Valley Police, told the Old Bailey: ‘We used to have a saying “don’t get out of the car” because if you get out you can get run over and you have also reduced your car’s effectiveness by 50 per cent because if it turned into a pursuit you have to get back into the vehicle, giving them an edge.

‘It’s probably not something PC Harper was familiar with.’

Henry Long, 18, and two 17-year-olds have admitted conspiring to steal the quad bike but have denied murder. Mr Shaw said his crew mate – pictured with his wife Lissie – got out of their patrol car when they met the Seat, which had been towing the quad bike, head-on in a country lane.

He said: ‘I could see him running in the road. My first thought was he’s running after the car trying to get in it. It’s what he would have done. I thought he was trying to get to the open door, drag them out of the car.

‘As the car accelerated, PC Harper was standing there and he just appeared to fall back as if his feet had been whipped from under him and that’s the last I saw of him.’

Another constable, Christopher Bushnell, told the jury he gave chase in his Mitsubishi Outlander. ‘I saw what was being towed behind the vehicle rolling, arms and legs,’ he said. ‘Just a bloody mess. I assumed it was a deer.’

The constable said he chased the Seat at speeds of up to 80mph, and at one point the driver tried to ram him. ‘It was like chasing a shadow because he had no lights on and I was almost second-guessing where they were going,’ he told the court.

The incident took place in Sulhamstead in Berkshire last August.

Long, of Mortimer, Reading, has admitted manslaughter, which his co-accused deny.

The trial continues.