Eisteddfod prize winner crashed into oncoming car by accident, coroner rules
WOMAN, 25, WAS THREE TIMES LEGAL ALCOHOL LIMIT IN COLLISION THAT KILLED HER AND 32-YR-OLD NURSE
A TROUBLED woman whose car veered into an oncoming vehicle did not intend to die but lost control accidentally, a coroner found last week.
Sara Anest Jones, 25, died three days after the collision and a passenger in the oncoming car also lost her life.
Ms Jones was more than three times the drink drive limit and left a note saying “Sori” in her rucksack. She had also rekindled a friendship with a Welsh actor which caused her parents concern.
Ms Jones, 25, had been driving a blue Seat Leon which collided with a red Honda Civic on the A4087 between the Faenol roundabout and Bangor, on March 30, 2021.
The Honda passenger Gemma Pasague Adran, 32, on her way home from work in Porthmadog, also died.
But a coroner at a two-day inquest in Stoke last week concluded that Ms Jones’ level of intoxication and driving speed could have led to a misjudgement as she may have initially lost control and veered left, before overcorrecting and going into the opposite carriageway.
The coroner also heard Ms Jones suffered multiple injuries including a bowel injury and that a radiological report and CT scan were not transferred with the patient when she was flown by Wales Air Ambulance helicopter from Ysbyty Gwynedd in Bangor to the Royal Stoke University Hospital (RSUH).
Indeed, once Ms Jones reached the RSUH doctors made a “catalogue of errors”, said Assistant Coroner Duncan
Ritchie. He concluded that Ms Jones died from a road traffic collision and that the death was contributed to by neglect.
He will be sending a prevention of future deaths report to both hospitals although he noted that the issues at the Stoke unit were more serious than those in North Wales. The inquest heard Ms Jones’ parents Aled and Ann believed her “re-establishing contact” with actor Llion Lloyd Williams - who asked her to keep their “platonic” friendship a secret - could have explained her behaviour that night.
Ms Jones, a Bangor University student, had met Mr Williams when he was an Eisteddfod adjudicator several years earlier and they formed a friendship. Ms Jones’ parents said in a statement they believed Sara’s contact with Mr Williams had ended in July 2018 and felt “trepidation” when they learned it had resumed.
They said Ms Jones said Mr Williams had asked her to keep the relationship secret which the parents believe made her “distressed” and had a “detrimental effect on her mental health”.
The inquest has heard Ms Jones had some mental health issues and Ms Jones’ parents added: “We believe the combination of dealing with her depression and anxiety with re-establishing the contact with Mr Llion Williams may have tipped the balance in Sara’s mind.”
They fear she “might have reached the end of her tether and did this to harm herself in a final self-destructive act”. The collision killed nurse Gemma Adran, who had been travelling with her partner Warren Culaton from work in Porthmadog to their home in the Bangor area.
Mr Culaton was seriously injured but survived. The Jones’ suggested their daughter would never have hurt anyone.
They added: “Sara was not a malicious person and would have been horrified to cause such heartache.”
In his own statement, read out by the assistant coroner, Mr Williams said Ms Jones, who won the Blue Riband Award at the Eisteddfod among other drama prizes, was an “outstanding talent”.
He said they had a “platonic” relationship but he thought she hoped it would develop into something more “emotional and physical”. She was becoming “quite heavy” and he told her there would be nothing more in it.
On the day of the crash, Mr Williams told Ms Jones she was welcome to come over while he was watching a Wales football match at home on TV. She didn’t arrive and he assumed she had gone to a friend’s house.
Following her death, he said in his statement: “I feel terrible for her family. Her death is a great loss for all her family and friends and the acting world in Wales as she had so much to offer everyone.”
Assistant Coroner Duncan Ritchie concluded she died from a road traffic collision contributed to by neglect. He did not find she deliberately drove into the Honda because there could have been several passengers in it including children - and there was no evidence she was “that reckless or selfish”.
Straying to her nearside - her left and over correcting into the opposite lane was more likely, he reasoned. The inquest heard a car suspected of being in the fatal crash had been driven “erratically” in Bangor city centre earlier that evening.
The assistant coroner also found Ms Jones suffered a bowel injury in the crash. But staff at RSUH did not identify the bowel injury and she developed peritonitis. Indeed, the inquest heard nurses twice told Ms Jones’ mother that the “agony” she felt when her mother touched her tummy was due to “seatbelt bruises”.
When the parents left Stoke to rest on April 1 their daughter had a “grey” complexion, which indicated she was seriously unwell, the inquest heard, but her condition deteriorated.
She died the next day from fecal peritonitis with a secondary cause of small bowel perforation, with a further cause of blunt abdominal trauma brought about by multiple crush injuries.
The assistant coroner said there had been a “catalogue of errors” and “missed opportunities” in Ms Jones’ care which a senior doctor at RSUH accepted.
Mr Ritchie said: “I find that that the failings in care ultimately resulted in Sara’s death.”