No one could listen to bereaved mum Crystal Owen speak so compellingly about why newly qualified drivers must build up experience before giving lifts to their friends without feeling stricken for her. Crystal’s 17-year-old son Harvey drowned in a car with three friends on a camping trip when his friend approached a bend in an unfamiliar rural road. Four excited friends off for an adventure in Snowdonia driven by one who had passed his driving test six months earlier.
“My son was able to get in the back of a car driven by a young, inexperienced driver and be driven on an unfamiliar rural road without my knowledge,” she said. If any good can come out of losing her precious son, it would be to save other young people who die because of inexperience. A police forensic collision investigator’s evidence was that there had been an “understeer” of the car as it navigated a bend on a 60mph road.
He calculated its maximum theoretical speed as 38mph. Nothing reckless. Simply inexperience.
All four sixth formers died shortly after the car left the road into water. A tragic waste of life and promise. Families bereft.
And it only takes a second. Anyone who has battled with their own teenagers about trips in their friends’ cars as soon as they have ripped up their L plates, or turned themselves inside out with anxiety when they are later home than they said will shudder at just how easy tragedies like this can happen. I remember that sick feeling when my younger son told me he.
