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?

Are you doing the school run in a heavily urban area in them?

No one's saying people who need these vehicles shouldn't have them, but I'm willing to bet that vehicle had never been off road.

Where abouts do you live? I have to say I agree with you in cities and urban areas - there are a huge amount of Chelsea tractors that are not required. However, I live in a really rural area. The majority of people I know have a 4x4 of some description in the area and I'd say the vast majority genuinely have a need for one. We certainly couldn't manage without ours. And yes - they regularly have to go off road and do what they are meant to do!

But that’s a terrible reason.
You can’t rely on grief stricken parents to make rational, thought out decisions!
Of course they’re not convinced right now. Hopefully in time they will be and find some measure of peace.
Thankfully they don’t get to make life ruining decisions about the innocence of other people. If is was up to them she’d probably have been run down by her own car, thankfully it’s not up to them.

No, it can occur at anytime. Largely in children and older people but anytime. It's very misunderstood.
Regarding time to clear: there would've been witness statements, she would have undergone medical testing, it's not especially long.

I feel for everyone involved. I hope she realises she's blameless and gains control of her condition and the girls' parents find peace.

It's the classic Andy Hill defence that is basically a get out of jail free card. Undiagnosed sudden illness means no responsibility for the crash. That's the end of it. Obviously this case is not as bad as the Shoreham disaster because only two people lost their lives, my point is if Hill was able to get off Scot-free due to medical reasons, it's completely understandable that the driver in this case can use a similar defence in a much more minor incident and not even face prosecution.

In what way do they not match?

She was diagnosed afterwards.

That would have to be part of any thinking on legislation but many people who live rurally do not have them. Many people who live in towns, cities and villages have them and don't need them.

She wouldn’t be able to use “undiagnosed seizures” as a defence if she had indeed a history of seizures.

Seriously? Something fishy? Well connected? She's developed a serious neurological condition which has changed her life and accidentally killed two girls, which must be punishment enough. Let's give her some sympathy here too.

Not all seizures are due to epilepsy. Not all epolepsy will show on an eeg, not all doctors will give an epilepsy diagnosis based on one seizure

Not an expert, just my son's experience. Although he does now have a diagnosis. And he doesn't drive

Same logic applies - you also can’t rely on statements potentially from people trying to get away from such serious consequences.

For me, I simply just found it odd not remembering anything at all.

Accidents happen all the time due to medical incidents. You see them in the local news fairly regularly. The only reason that this seems different is because the victims were two small children outside school, and the driver was driving a big car. But neither of those things mean this is less likely to be a very tragic accident the likes of which happen across the world daily. Why are people so keen to look for a conspiracy?

You're assuming the police and CPS just took her word for it that she'd had a seizure – which of course they wouldn't have done! She'd have had to undergo medical assessment by independent experts – i.e. ones with no connection to her, not paid for by her etc – to confirm her diagnosis of epilepsy.

The fact is, people fall ill at the wheel all the time with things like heart attacks, strokes and epilepsy and sometimes those result in accidents where others die. Tragic, unavoidable accidents where no one is to blame – just like the one we're talking about.

I'm in so many epilepsy groups where people have developed it at every decade. It's honestly not that unusual. Everyone has a seizure threshold. I'm not discounting the parents' grief, but you can have a seizure at any age.

This is what we have been saying at home. How does it take a YEAR to find this information out and draw a conclusion?

Because the first said she'd "suffered a previously undiagnosed seizure" and the second that "it was the first seizure she had experienced"

The key of course is that the first (?) one didn't lead to a diagnosis, but that doesn't change the fact that she suffered it and that therefore the one which led to the deaths wasn't the first - unless I'm reading it wrong?

i agree, this is not like the Glasgow case a few years ago when a lorry driver had a seizure and caused a similar accident, it turned out he knew he was prone to seizures and should not have been driving in the first place. There is a huge difference between carelessness, deliberately doing something dangerous and something happening that you have no control over, like your first ever seizure.

The two statements say the same thing to me, that there was no prior history of seizures and that the seizure she experienced that day was her first.

I think it's just clumsy language. I think they mean the cause of the seizure (ie epliepsy) was previously undiagnosed and that's because she hadn't had a seizure previously.

There is a massive CPS backlog. Charging decisions are taking far longer and thousands of cases due to go to court are being kept in a holding pattern for months. A year in a case as complex as this one isn't actually that long.

I agree, I don't think a year is that long compared to what some cases take. It won't be a year's worth of work, it will have spent a lot of that time just waiting for attention.

CPS delays, delving into medical records, probably having to do MRI's and CT scans to see whether the driver's brain had any indications of prior seizures, etc, etc.

They can't advertise the fact that she'd had a seizure before the official report came out, because if it did turn out that she'd got evidence of prior seizures they might have been able to prosecute her and putting stuff out to the press could prejudice a fair trial.

Not everything is a conspiracy. Things take time, especially post Covid.

I can understand that the families feel that someone should be responsible, but the poor driver did absolutely nothing wrong. She was driving a legal car, perfectly healthily and something totally unexpected and unpredictable happened. What other conclusion could they have come to? There is no law broken here. No dangerous driving, because she wasn't doing it intentionally. She had a medical episode, that's all.

I see others have said they'd assumed dangerous driving when they saw the news in the first instance. My instant reaction was a medical episode (though I had assumed middle aged man has heart attack type episode, not healthy woman has first epileptic seizure)

Unfortunately I suspect this will end up being dragged through civil courts, so the only people that will win are the solicitors.

For anyone doubting late diagnosed epilepsy, a popular YouTuber has just been diagnosed with it and she shares her story here - - in her case there were some signs over a very long period of time, but nothing that would immediately point to epilepsy until her first seizure.

Despite only having one "proper" seizure, the scans she had showed that she'd got markers in her brain that had confirmed that she'd been having vacant seizures for some time. In this driver's case it's quite possible that the scan showed no evidence of a prior seizure, hence the bringing of no charges.

Actually - that makes sense - thank you! In my head, the delay had been with the police not with the CPS and it had seemed ridiculous. Now it doesn't .

from what I’ve been told by people affected (which is a great many more than just the bereaved parents - the kids who witnessed it, their families, their teachers - there are people I know involved) what they are mainly questioning is why the police have told them all along that the cause for the delays have been extensive forensic investigations into the vehicle itself.

Then suddenly it’s dropped because of medical reasons.

those may be valid medical reasons, but you can understand why it looks very strange given what the police themselves were saying all along and why there are unanswered questions