Back From the Brink

His innocent involvement in a tragic two-vehicle crash in which the female car passenger died is recounted by the truck driver who, for legal reasons, has to remain anonymous but is now back behind the wheel

It’s been three months since the accident, but I still have no idea what’s happening with the court case. The police won’t tell us anything at the moment. I’m not in trouble myself, but I am a witness who might have to testify, so I’ll have to keep some of the specific details to myself – my name, who I work for, the location of the accident, that kind of thing. I’ll be glad when it’s all over now, to be honest, but it isn’t.

What I can say is that I’ve been driving for 10 years and I’m on for a company based in the South West, pulling flats on agricultural work. I’m in an artic now, but the truck this happened to was a wagon & drag. Our boss likes to do the shows, so the motors have had a lot of money spent on them and are pretty well known out on the road.

It was Tuesday 1 November 2016 and I’d had a reasonably easy shift. Our job can be hard work, being flats, but that day I’d only had one delivery and one lot of strapping down to do and was heading up to my tip for the following morning. It was 7pm and I was on around 11 hours’ spread over, with a couple of hours of driving left. I’d stopped for a coffee and a sandwich not long before, so I was pretty alert.

I was driving along a wide single carriage way bypass and had just come off one of the roundabouts and up an incline, building up speed as I dropped down the other side. There’s a gentle right-hand bend and as I came round it I saw what I thought at first was a car overtaking, but as I watched I realised it wasn’t pulling back in; it was just doing a steady speed and following the layout of the road on my side.