Crash driver ‘asleep’ – officer

A horrific crash in which a van carrying seven passengers flew off a 10-metre cliff was caused by the driver falling asleep, a court has heard.

Sandeep Kumar, 34, appeared in the Napier District Court yesterday to defend seven charges of careless driving causing injuring in relation to a crash on the Napier-Taupo Rd early last year.

Kumar was driving the peoplemover back from Auckland and was not far from Te Haroto about 6.45am on January 2 when it veered left on to a grass verge, then back across the road, where it rolled, then flew over the cliff.

It hit foliage before crashing into a ravine, where it landed on its wheels in a stream.

Kumar and two friends had left Havelock North in the van at 2pm on New Year’s Day to collect his Melbourne-based brother, his wife and three children from the airport about 2am on the day of the crash. He then headed straight back to Hawke’s Bay.

He was badly injured in the crash, but managed to escape from the van, pull others from the wreckage, and carry his 6-monthold nephew up to the road, where he flagged down a passing car. All of the passengers survived.

In yesterday’s judge-alone trial, before Judge Geoff Rea, four police officers gave evidence that the vehicle had nudged a sloped concrete kerb seven times over a distance of about 50 metres, before it mounted the kerb and continued for a further 50m in a straight line along a grass verge beside the road.

The officers said tyre marks left in the grass showed that it was only after smashing into a road sign that Kumar applied his brakes and attempted to steer back on to the road.

When police spoke to Kumar 10 days after the crash, he said he had been awake at the time, and denied any fault on his part.

Senior Constable Corey Ubels said he believed a report prepared for Kumar’s defence, was flawed in its assertion that the crash might have been caused by a flat tyre. A flat tyre would have left deeper and more obvious marks in the grass verge, and he was certain Kumar was asleep until he drove into the sign.

‘‘There was more than enough time to do something about this before he hit the sign, and he hasn’t. The moment he’s hit that kerb, if he was awake and alert . . . he would have either braked or turned the steering wheel. He hasn’t done either,’’ Ubels said.

‘‘He was either unconscious or asleep at the wheel, or he’s been distracted doing something else, but he hasn’t reacted when he should have.’’