Grandmother guilty of car park tragedy
A GRANDMOTHER who killed an elderly woman when she reversed over her at Bluewater is facing sentence.
Dawn Chedd denied causing the death of 71-year-old Claire Bishop by careless driving, but a jury of seven men and five women took less than 30 minutes to convict her.
Sentence was adjourned for reports until July 15.
Maidstone Crown Court heard how Chedd, of Cranleigh Drive, Swanley, lost control of her automatic people carrier while parking at the Greenhithe shopping centre on January 4 last year.
The victim and her husband Roy, from Bexleyheath, were walking back to their car in the afternoon when the tragedy happened.
Chedd, a retired child minder, claimed in evidence she had no memory of what happened.
She said she could only recall going to Bluewater about a job with a friend’s two-year-old daughter in the back of her Vauxhall Zafira.
But witnesses told how the car shot out of a parking bay in an arc with tyres screeching at about 20mph and struck three cars before mowing down Mrs Bishop.
The Zafira ended up on the front of a car that was parked in the same row of bays. It was still in reverse with the engine running.
Chedd, 50-year-old wife of a retired police officer, was found lying injured between two of the cars that had been hit. The driver’s door was open. The child in the car was uninjured.
Mrs Bishop was taken, critically injured, to London’s King’s College Hospital. She died five days later on January 9.
The prosecutor said the car was not found to have any faults and a collision investigator believed Chedd must have attempted to stop it by putting her foot on the brake but caught the accelerator instead.