Lesson Learnt

A woman has been jailed for two years for killing a 9 year old girl on her first driving lesson, I read the headline and I wasn't prepared for the heap of wrong that lay within. The woman went out on a driving lesson with her husband after having only completed some online theory questions. People do this often, but usually it's somewhere children won't get killed. I did it in a car park, I drove the car straight into a bollard. That's not the point, the car was fixed and the bollard wasn't alive so no-one was hurt long term. The emotional scarring does cause me to wake up screaming at night, but there isn't a dead child on my conscience just a whole array of other guilty feelings.

Here's another dash of wrong, apparently the car was going very fast and upon needing to brake....the learner didn't know how to. "She did not know how to apply the brake pedal; she could not find the brake pedal; she did not know where it was or what purpose it served"

That's pretty basic stuff right there, infact if I was unsure before getting in the car I might like to ask how to slow down something that I can make reach speeds of upto and over 100mph. I understand the blind panic as she was heading towards the children's play area but not knowing what purpose the brake pedal served is just beyond my scope of thinking.

"When challenged by the police the learner was unable to say which pedal was the brake"

To be honest having got to the stage she did she had used two of the three pedals available to her, having not been able to stop the car with those she should have taken a wild guess at which one it may have been.

I'm not making fun of this situation, I'm just stating that this is a whole heap of wrong. I don't know who to blame, the courts have decided that the learner is at fault which of course she is. Not just for being behind the wheel, but for allowing herself to get behind the wheel without knowledge of the very basics of driving. The husband is not legally to blame, but he is far from innocent.

The parents of the victim have accepted that the incident was not intentional, they are far more forgiving than most. The learner may not have set out to kill, but nor would the toddler you hand a gun to.