The driver in the Wimbledon school accident won't be charged?

[RiverF]

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cw4448xx4keo

It sounds like a unavoidable and unforeseeable medical incident led to the tragedy, but the families wanted justice.

I can't begin to imagine their pain, but this is the right decision?

Might they know if she was still having the seizure?

The woman has to live with killing two little girls because of a medical episode for the rest of her life. As long as she never goes behind a wheel again I think it’s the right decision. The parents are looking to blame someone but it was an accident. Why don’t they blame the school for having a wooden fence protecting a school. All schools I know have a metal fences.

Twitter says he is a KC. But I’ve not been able to verify that. Certainly a top lawyer from what I can find.

I understand the families would have liked the evidence publicly interrogated, but won't the inquest do that?

It’s so sad. It was a true freak Accident.
We use the word Accident quite carelessly in general, forgetting that it actually means an unintentional and unexpected event, not caused deliberately. Instead we commonly use the word to describe an event where prior care has not been taken.
In this case, no carelessness seems to have been involved.

There is also the option of a civil prosecution by the families who also presumably have money.

Epileptic people can drive they just have to be medicated and I think have six months free. If indeed she’s epileptic which she may not be, could just be a one off which is common. See my previous post 1 in 25 people in their lifetime.

Does that mean everyone who has every had one seizure is never allowed to do anything that requires constant focus again?

The ones I had were the tonic-clonic (grand mal) ones. The things I don’t remember is how they started. However, I was very much aware during and afterwards.*

You’re in the minority there because that’s not the norm so it’s entirely believable that she has absolutely no recollection of it.

www.epilepsy.org.uk/info/seizures/tonic-clonic

This is nonsense.
People die everyday with no one being responsible for that death.
Someone dying doesn’t mean someone else is accountable.
Thank god the laws of this country don’t allow us to put people who did nothing wrong in jail.
I don’t quite understand what people think the alternative answer is?
Drink? Drugs? Both would have been tested for.
I don’t think anyone ploughs into a school through mere carelessness.

A bit harsh? May be not someone to hate but to hold accountable? I can't imagine being in their position. And we don't know what the investigation process has been like behind closed doors

It was said very early on that the driver had had “ a medical issue” , which I assumed meant that she had tested negative for drink/ drugs and that the vehicle had no major faults.

It must be very painful for the families , this must be the most awful time of year for them, and always will be. I don’t know how you move on with your life with that ache in your whole being.

I just cannot imagine how she gets through every day with this in her head

I actually don't think she should be charged, but I think the good expensive lawyers and probably private medical evidence probably had a lot to do with her getting off free as well.

The trajectory of the car was consistent with a medical episode as there was no attempt to brake/swerve and the car didn’t follow the line of the road.

The only other explanation would be drink/drugs but she was breathalysed and tested at the time as you’d expect.

But not necessarily an untrue one!
Why assume that she’s lying?
To fit in with the witch hunt narrative?

Could a smaller, less powerful car have even breached the fence to end up in that position

That was my thought too. I only have a small car and I can't imagine it would get through a properly constructed fence unless I was eg going at motorway speed.

I know a couple of fit youngish men who've had strokes - it can come out of the blue and it's just fortunate that they were both at home when they had theirs and not in their cars. Also see Jess Warner Judd who is an elite athlete and 10,000m runner in her 20s who was recently diagnosed with epilepsy. I have no idea who the driver is or who her husband is, but if she had a seizure and had never had one before. it's just a very sad outcome. Other than considering robustness of fencing for schools/public places and having a look at whether the fact that it was a large and heavy SUV played a role, and whether their sale needs to be restricted, I don't think there's much else you can do to prevent it happening again.

I also don't think she'd get off killing two children because of who her husband is. The UK authorities did their best to prosecute that American diplomat's wife when she drove on the wrong side of the road and killed a young man.

@Scruffily if she was still convulsing then yeah but she'd have had to be convulsing for a long (potentially very dangerous) amount of time for it to have still been happening by the time she's crashed, ambulances have been called and arrived.

I'm not saying she hasn't had a seizure. I'm more pointing out to those that seem to think that diagnosing epilepsy just needs a scan. it isn't like that. In fact if people look at some of the children's health forums here, they'd know that people don't even start investigations until there have been two seizures.

From the Epilepsy Action link

During the tonic phase:
You lose consciousness, so you won’t be aware of what’s happening

How can you say that? It’s clearly not a given.
The heavier the vehicle, the bigger the impact, and the more severe the injury. Being hit by a bike is not as bad as being hit by a bus. Being hit by a Ford Fiesta is not the same as being hit by a Land Rover. If only people would stop feeling the need to drive massive bloody trucks around, pedestrians would stand a better chance.

Because the road in question is absolutely tiny (single car only) and on a bend and on the edge of the common. It doesn’t lead anywhere significant, it’s not a cut through, you could stand there for an hour and see one car pass. Tbh it’s hard to even see how it was even possible for a car to do the damage it did knowing f the road and the angle she must have been coming from. To suggest anything could possibly have been foreseen here is absurd (I don’t mean that rudely just that the school could never in a million years have expected or guessed at such an awful thing happening).

Even drink or drugs, I think you'd realise and take some evasive action, even if you weren't capable of doing that successfully.

At the time, I thought it must either be a deliberate attack, to plough into those people (which I'm sure has been established it wasn't) or a medical episode .

@parkrun500club again I don't think she should be charged, but hiring expensive lawyers with reams of arguments and private medical evidence is a bit different from just doing a runner and not turning up at trial like the American's wife...

there is no way to check hours afterwards (and it was far more likely days afterwards) if someone actually had a seizure. You cannot show this on a brain scan. If someone was plugged in during a seizure you'd see brain waves changing, but you can't go into hospital the day after and prove that someone had a seizure.

But the way the justice system works, you can't prove that she didn't have a seizure either. I hope she is telling the truth and actually had a seizure, but it would be possible with good legal advice to say after the fact you don't remember what happened and it must have been a seizure.

They say there has been an extensive investigation, so I hope they carefully checked her phone records to see if her phone had any sort of activity at the time of the accident. I assume this was done. I wonder - given the victims' lawyers are disappointed with the decision - if they have any further information on what was and wasn't checked during the investigation.

If she indeed had an unexpected seizure, of course she shouldn' be charged. Equally, as others have said I am sure the guilt and social stigma that comes along with this is severe punishment already.

I feel heartbroken for the families, it's absolutely tragic.

Are we now in a world where being rich automatically makes you guilty? Top lawyers can argue, but they can't make medical evidence exist if it doesn't, given that anything they put forward will be checked by opposing medical experts.

I don't know anything about epilepsy but I do know that if you have a tonic clonic seizure it's entirely possible that you won't remember anything about it.

I recently read Nicola Nuttall's book about her daughter Laura who died of brain cancer. In the early days after diagnosis, Laura had a tonic clonic seizure and remembered nothing from eating a meal the night before (Nicola said she wished she could say the same as it was highly distressing for other members of the family).