TORQUAY MUM MOURNED
A TORQUAY mother killed in a freak crash had been on her way home with her baby son after attending a funeral.
Sarah Tonkin, 37, died when a 10kg tow bar was flicked up by a passing truck’s tyres into her path on Friday afternoon.
Her Hyundai sedan, carrying her eight-month-old son, Austin, then veered off the Geelong-Bacchus Marsh Rd, at Balliang East, and rolled on to its side crashing into a tree.
Austin survived and was discharged from the Royal Children’s Hospital on the weekend back into the arms of his father, Gregor Jeffery.
Ms Tonkin had been returning home from her elderly aunt’s funeral, which she attended with her parents in Macedon.
Her parents Richard and Pauline Tonkin said on the weekend they had not stopped crying for 24 hours.
“All we have is tears,” Mr Tonkin said. “Sarah was the most beautiful daughter.
“She was one of those people when they went into a room, the room just lit up.”
Mr Tonkin believed he was the last person to see his daughter alive, having said goodbye to her after the funeral.
“They decided to not come to the cemetery,” he said.
“I kissed both her and Austin goodbye, then this dreadful, terrible thing happens.
“It’s so hard to imagine that if she was one second earlier or later she would be still with us.”
Sarah and Gregor married in May 2014 and, after many years of trying to conceive, were “over the moon” to welcome Austin in April this year.
“He completed their family,” Mr Tonkin said.
“Their lives were really just beginning.”
Investigators have described Ms Tonkin’s death as a “freak” accident where she was in the wrong place at the wrong time.
A B-double truck had run over the large metal pintle hook on the road, picking it up in its tyres and flinging it into her car’s path.
Police hope to track down the truck driver and the owner of the vehicle that lost its tow bar.
But Detective Acting Sgt Philip Frith, from the Major Collision Investigation Unit, said it was purely to have a better understanding how the tragedy happened.
Ms Tonkin’s death was the fourth fatality on the road this year, after a Steiglitz man, 25, and a Clifton Springs woman, 61, were killed in a three-car collision on October 27, and following a crash that killed a man in Lara.
The Geelong-Bacchus Marsh Rd is designated as one of the state’s 20 highest-risk roads, and has been earmarked for upgrades and the installation of safety barriers.
In 2017 the State Government called on VicRoads to fast-track safety works on the deadly road, after it claimed 10 lives in just over five years.