The guilty habit that could turn you into a killer
Few of us are foolish enough to drink and drive. But texting at the wheel can be just as deadly — and accident rates are soaring
LAURA THOMAS once had the world at her feet. A petite blonde of only 5ft tall, what she lacked in height she made up for in sparkle. Her family called her Tinkerbell.
Caring and warm-hearted, the 20-yearold worked with special needs children and was learning sign language to enhance her skills.
‘She knew exactly what she wanted to do,’ recalls her mother Lisa. ‘She wanted to get married, and then she would qualify as a play therapist for children with learning difficulties. She was full of plans.’
Tragically, Laura never got the chance to realise those dreams: three years ago, on a warm July morning, she was killed in a road traffic accident on a trip to Wales.
The cause of the collision makes it all the more wretched: Laura’s life was cut short because Ian Glover, the lorry driver who ploughed into her broken-down car, was looking at his phone instead of the road ahead. By the time he did glance up, it was too late.
‘He was on a straight road and according to the police he had 19 seconds to see the car in front of him and apply his brakes,’ says Lisa. ‘Instead he was looking down at his phone and because of that our daughter’s future was destroyed. And for what?’
Using a hand-held mobile device when driving has been illegal since December 2003, but the law seems to have had little effect on Britain’s millions of motorists.
On motorways, A-roads and at junctions up and down the country, glance at the car beside you and chances are you will see the driver head down, tapping away at their mobile.
As a result, the number of motoring accidents and fatalities attributed to this specific distraction has risen by 29 per cent in recent years. Department of Transport statistics show that 492 people in the UK were involved in accidents in 2014 — the latest year for which statistics are available — caused by drivers being distracted by their phones.
And just last week the Mail reported on the case of DC Sharon Garrett, 48, a married mother of two young children from Cambridgeshire, who was killed by a lorry driver who opened a text message seconds before veering into oncoming traffic and ploughing into her Renault Clio.
Sharon, a police officer for 25 years, was on her way home from work when Danny Warby’s 13.6 tonne goods vehicle swerved across the road and collided with her car.
She was pronounced dead at the scene. Her family have not been publicly identified, but in a statement said they had been left ‘devastated’ by their loss.
According to Jack Kushner, a spokesman for road-safety charity Brake, many of those ‘who would not dream of drink-driving have used a mobile phone at the wheel’. Yet, according to a Transport Research Laboratory study, the reaction times of texting drivers are 35 per cent slower than those fully focused on driving.
Another large-scale study by U.S. authorities, meanwhile, found that texting drivers were 23 times more likely to crash than a driver paying full attention.
In other words, it is as dangerous as drink-driving, or putting on a gauzy blindfold at the wheel.
Yet the message doesn’t seem to be getting through: a survey last month by insurer Direct Line revealed that more than 40 per cent of drivers admitted to sending or reading text messages or accessing apps on their smartphone while driving — a number that increased to a staggering 55 per cent among drivers in the 25-34 age bracket.
It comes as no surprise to Laura’s mother, Lisa: every time she walks out the front door, she sees drivers glued to their mobiles, apparently oblivious to the threat they pose.
‘Each time I see someone it is like a knife to the heart,’ she says. ‘Otherwise law-abiding citizens who would not dream of committing any other criminal act will happily use their mobiles in the car.’
Lisa, 48, a healthcare assistant from Stafford, was on holiday abroad with her youngest daughter Gemma, then 18, when she learned of her eldest daughter’s tragic death.
HER plasterer husband David, 49, had stayed at home to look after the family dogs, while Laura had also elected to stay behind, as she didn’t want to take time off work during term time.
Instead, she had set off for a short break in Wales with her fiance, Lewis Pagett, when their car broke down on an A-road after an engine sensor failed.
They had stepped over the safety barrier to keep out of harm’s way, but Laura was killed instantly when Glover failed to see their car and crashed into it, sending it flying over the safety barrier and straight into them. Her fiance suffered multiple injuries.
Lisa says: ‘At Glover’s trial, his defence counsel said you can’t judge him on what he did, he could just as easily have been reading a map. But he wasn’t reading a map, he was staring down mobile phone.’
Sickeningly, Glover was looking at explicit dating websites.
He received a five-year sentence for causing Laura’s death by dangerous driving — although for her grieving parents and sister it is a life sentence.
It is now just over three years since Laura was killed, leaving what her mum calls ‘a giant hole’ at the heart of the family.
‘We were all so close. Gemma had to cope with losing the elder sister she adored and for all of us there is always someone missing,’ says Lisa.
This is just the kind of tragedy ‘mobile vigilante’ Dave Sherry is attempting to avert.
Dave, from Harlow, Essex, records law-breaking motorists on a sophisticated camera positioned on his bicycle helmet as he cycles from home to his work as a bus driver in London.
He started collecting footage when a motorist veered dangerously close to him while he cycled with his then one-year-old daughter Emily on the back.
That, coupled with another incident where a motorist got too close on a busy road, buckling his back wheel, strengthened his resolve to take action.
Today he sends footage of any errant drivers to the police: dozens receive cautions, fines or points on their licence as a result.
Four years in, he says the number of motorists on the phone has increased exponentially.
By his estimate, three in every ten motorists are at it — and the majority of them these days are not making calls but checking social media or texting.
‘Catching them is like shooting fish in a barrel,’ says Sherry. ‘It’s one after the other, and it’s all ages and types of people — guys in white vans, professional people, mums on the school run texting or Facebooking with a car full of kids.’
The numbers have increased further, he says, following the release of the gaming app Pokemon Go.
‘I’ve even seen an HGV driver looking at it in his cab as he drove along a busy carriageway. They are completely immersed in it to the detriment of anything else around them,’ he says. ‘It’s flabbergasting.’
That is one word for it: thoughtless, dangerous and utterly selfish might be others. Yet Sherry says those he confronts about their mobile phone use are almost universally indignant and defensive rather than apologetic.
‘They come out with some rubbish: “I needed to get this message”, “I was only checking the once.” It’s pathetic,’ he says.
Because once, of course, is sometimes all it takes. In 2013, partially-sighted pensioner David Wright was killed and his wife at his
Pauline left with multiple fractures after 28-year-old Samantha Pitcher mowed them down as they crossed the road near their home in Lowestoft, Suffolk.
Her mobile phone was positioned by the gearstick of her car, and she had been distracted by a message that popped up seconds before she lost control. She was later sentenced to a two-year driving ban, an 18-month community order and 240 hours of unpaid work after being found guilty of causing death by careless driving.
And who knows how many near misses unfold on Britain’s roads every day as a result of our ongoing mobile obsession?
Alex Wood, a 37-year-old weddings and interiors stylist from Wigan, still shudders when she thinks about what could have happened when, in 2012, her Volvo sports estate was shunted from behind on a slip road approaching the busy M62 when she was nearly nine months pregnant.
She was unharmed, but when she got out, shocked and dazed, it was to be confronted by a stuttering female driver apologising for being on her phone.
‘I was lucky,’ says Alex, ‘I could have been shunted into the path of a lorry. I had also just upgraded to a big Volvo from my VW Beetle soft top in preparation for the baby, so I was a bit more protected, but it still makes me feel sick to think about it.’
Today she is the proud mum of Spencer, five, but knows she was incredibly fortunate: ‘You think, “There but for the Grace of God!” ’ she says.
Zoe Carvin wasn’t so lucky. Ten years ago, the 42-year-old teacher was killed at the wheel of her blue Skoda as she waited at traffic lights on the A1 in Northumberland. Her vehicle was crushed by a lorry, which ploughed into the back of her. The driver, Andrew Crisp, 26, had been looking at a text message.
Zoe was returning to the family home in Morpeth, Northumberland, after a morning at the beach walking her dogs with her mother, Veronica.
She never made it: instead, her retired schools inspector husband Paul, now 58, was visited by traffic officers who shared the grim news that his wife would never be coming home.
His first thought was for the couple’s children — Ben, then 13, and 11-year-old Emily.
‘I looked out of the window and saw Emily coming up the drive after school,’ he recalls now. ‘I remember distinctly how happy she looked, knowing what I was going to tell her would ruin her life.
Later that evening, he had to go through the same thing again when Ben returned from playing football. Only weeks later did the family learn the reason behind Zoe’s death.
‘It seemed, and still seems, so senseless,’ says Paul. ‘She didn’t die of disease, but because somebody decided to text.’
Her mother, Veronica, sustained multiple injuries in the collision, while five others were also injured.
Ten years on, Zoe’s death continues to resonate deeply.
‘We function, but it is always there, just below the surface,’ says Paul. ‘Emily has just got engaged and we are already thinking about the wedding day and the fact her mother will not be there. She is still having counselling and I have suffered from depression.’
Courageously, the Carvins made the decision to feel no hate towards the lorry driver who wrecked their family.
‘I felt that any bitterness would just have eaten away at us,’ says Paul. ‘He had to live with what he had done.’
TOdAY, his anger is reserved for the people he sees ‘all around him’, texting at the wheel and using their phones with apparently casual disregard for the potentially catastrophic consequences.
‘How would they like it if their children were being brought up without their mother?’ asks Paul. ‘We need far tougher penalties.’
It is a plea which is, at least, being investigated: earlier this year the department for Transport announced that it had launched a consultation on the introduction of stiffer penalties, the feedback from which is currently under review.
It is certainly difficult to suggest that the current penalties are much of a deterrent: at the moment, anyone caught flouting the law faces an on-the-spot fine of £100 and three penalty points on their licence, and can be summoned to a magistrates court if the offence is deemed more serious.
Paul Carvin would like to see this increased to an automatic driving ban for a year. ‘A fine doesn’t have an impact,’ he says.
Back in Essex, dave Sherry agrees with him.
‘People aren’t learning and the situation on the roads is getting worse,’ he says. ‘Far stiffer penalties are the only things that will get people to put their mobiles away when they’re in the car.’
No punishment handed down by law can, of course, ever truly compensate the families whose lives have been left in tatters.
In November, Ian Glover is set to be released from jail after serving two and a half years of his five-year sentence for Laura Thomas’s death.
‘He will be starting his life afresh, but we have to live with the consequences of what he has done forever,’ says Lisa. ‘You never get over it.’
Sadly, it may take many more shattered lives before Britain’s motorists finally learn to turn their attention from their beloved phones to the road in front of them.