Safe Speed Forums

Would you please take a moment of your time to look at my little girl's
memorial site, it tells you a little bit about her life , the accident and
how it has affected us afterwards.

We would be grateful if you could also sign the petition justice for Rebecca

Thanks
Sharon

www.rebeccasawyer.co.uk

Their is a problem with your link.

Please let me know what happened

_________________
Steve

My husband was driving back home from his parents house. Our daughters were in the back in their car seats. Rebecca was 6 and Kirsty
was 18 months old. A car drove through a red light and smashed into our
car. The car was stolen, the driver and passengers had been in the car
speeding around the streets and nearly knocked pedestrians over earlier in the evening. They had been in pubs in the afternoon and part of the
evening.
Kirsty was flung out of the car, witnesses thought she was a doll in the road, Rebecca had to be cut out of the car. She died ao 00.05 new years day. Steven had facial injuries. I was waiting at home for my girls .
The driver and passengers all ran away, the driver was not caught until
3 days later. The passengers would not tell police who was driving it took
2 days to find out!
The driver had 89 previous convictions, 2 life bans, he was a thief, arsonist, drug dealer and had already killed his friend in a stolen car when he was 15.
He was let out of prison 2 years and 8 months early(burglary offence)
and 2 months later killed my daughter and critically injured my baby.
He was sentenced to 9 1/2 years but will be out half way through his sentence. He showed no remorse at all, the passengers have been "bragging" about what happened as if it's a huge joke

This is the part of your dreadful story that I found hardest to swallow, I am appalled at this creatures history, he should not have been walking the streets at all. He was just looking for someone to kill, a gun waiting for the trigger to be pulled.

I have had a look at your wonderful, desperately sad website, by the time I looked at Rebecca's school friends comments, I had to leave, I found it too hard to take any more.
I consider myself a good and careful professional driver, both car and HGV, your website will make me endevour to be even better.

I cannot imagine what you and others like you are going through, but I imagine that every member of this safe speed website are in a similar position in offering you our most sincere condolences.

I also had a sad duty to perform the other weekend, to lay a floral tribute outside the Homebase store here in Grimsby for a truck driver burnt to death in his truck while asleep, in some way can you imagine that your beautiful darling daughters name was also on that tribute to Derek Bailey.

My your God bless you and help you through this awful time.

Andy

_________________
Semper in excreta, nur quantitat variat.

Surely a compelling argument for the restoration of traffic police levels.

Even the death penalty would not deter people such as this, as they do not believe they will be caught.

_________________
"Show me someone who says that they have never exceeded a speed limit, and I'll show you a liar, or a menace." (Austin Williams - Director, Transport Research Group)

Any views expressed in this post are personal opinions and may not represent the views of Safe Speed

Can we have a go at brainstorming other potential methods of prevention? This case was caused by a driver with loads of previous convictions, multiple active driving bans, a history of causing death by dangerous and an early release from prison.

I'll start the ball rolling with a list of ideas (some wild)...

* A tag that detects car travel (perhaps by GPS logging?), and court order than bans travel by car
* Cars require an electronic licence to start (but stolen licences are used to circumvent the system - a system would be needed to disable stolen licences, possibly by auto-expiry of all licences and re-enabling of valid ones.)
* Police monitor the movements of multi-banned drivers
* Medical prevention of future driving (blinding, removal of hands, death penalty etc)
* Keep in prison for much longer (reduced opportunity to drive)
* Teach safe driving (has to pass a class one style course BEFORE release from prison) (difficult to justify when banned)
* Make cars harder to steal
* deport to a prison island (Australia? )

Any more?

In general I believe that technical solutions are likely to lead to a criminal circumvention industry and won't do much good.

_________________
Paul Smith
Our scrap speed cameras petition got over 28,000 sigs
The Safe Speed campaign demands a return to intelligent road safety

My thoughts are with you Sharon.
Safe speed I think there are some very good ideas there which may work as a prevention to these people being able to offend again. The tagging idea using the gps system would be most effective, but again it still falls to having enough policing to watch these systems in order for them to work and somehow as lack of policing is a problem in this country having sufficient staff to watch over the scheme would probably be a major hurdle to start with.

If the GPS tag was made practical, perhaps it could be monitored automatically by software looking for patterns. I'd still be worried about criminal circumvention.

_________________
Paul Smith
Our scrap speed cameras petition got over 28,000 sigs
The Safe Speed campaign demands a return to intelligent road safety

I remember reading of this terrible incident at the time. My heart goes out to you. As a father of three myself I can only imagine the pain that you are going through. I sincerely hope that your web site will make a difference and that the criminal laws will be overhauled to prevent such tragic loss of life in the future.

Ric.