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Broken bike (CC licensed image by garryknight, www.flickr.com)£3,000 fine for Milkman who hit cyclist left him for dead and carried on delivering to customers
A milkman who was convicted of careless driving after he ran down a cyclist with his float on the wrong side of the road has been fined £3,000 and given a 70 day suspended sentence plus 70 hours unpaid work for a conviction of careless driving. He was also handed 10 penalty points for failing to report an accident.
After hitting the cyclist, David Reid, 71 told a companion he thought the ‘dangerous’ cyclist, Royal Navy submariner Paul Reynolds, 36, was dead before continuing to serve customers on his round.
Reid left Mr Reynolds lying in the road in Barrow in Furness, getting back in his cab and telling a passenger “I think he’s dead.”
He went on to deliver milk to four more houses before going to raise the alarm at a post office - and then making 15 more deliveries before he returned to the scene.
A jury at Burnley Crown Court found him not guilty of dangerous driving at a previous hearing.
Mr Reynolds, 36, remained in a coma for six months after the collision and is now permanently disabled in a nursing home with round the clock care. He suffered serious head injuries and multiple fractures to his pelvis.
The court heard that Reid, a milkman for 50 years, was driving at 8mph on the wrong side of the road on February 27 last year, when he crashed head on into Mr Reynolds, causing the submariner to smash into the windscreen.
The Daily Mail reported that Reid’s 15-year-old schoolboy passenger told an earlier trial: “Dave got out to see if he was alright, he said hello to him and he came back and said to me 'I think he's dead'.
“He kept saying 'What do I do?' and then he went 'Cyclists, they are dangerous on the road - they do not pay attention.'"
Mr Reynold's parents John and Margaret whose younger son Carl died in 1994 from leukaemia said they had to travel 120 miles a day to sit with their son at his bedside for five hours each day.
His mother described herself as 'heartbroken and his father 'a broken man'.
Reid told the court: “I said to him 'can you hear me?' a few times. There was no response. He was just lying there. I didn't dare touch him.”
After going to the post office and asking someone to ring the emergency services he said he was in a ‘confused' state of mind and made fifteen more milk deliveries.
He said: “It isn't in my nature at all to be callous. I was driving as I normally drive and that is careful.”
The judge said: “The fine - that is the only sentence I can impose - is not and could not be a measured of the valuation of the harm done and grief caused on that February morning.”
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15 comments
Didn't call for help
Translation: Didn't give a toss.
If I were Mr. Reynolds, I'd want retribution.
Milk floats aren't the fastest moving vehicles around.
Sounds to me like the driver turned in front of an unlit cyclist.
Whilst his actions after aren't great - I'd put that down to shock in an old guy.
The fault lay in the cyclist. No lights is verging on suicidal. It's not as if lights are expensive either.
The road cc story seems biased pro cyclist here. I'd rather it was fair. We are not all angels all the time.
Get the feeling road cc has a policy of peddling half truths to fire up outrage. Like to see balance from the comments above. Cyclists aren't always blameless and drivers are fallable. The milkman sounds like he went into shock and made some bad decisions. Sad story all round.
Some of the 'journalism' here is really of very poor quality. But road.cc's real value is in the product reviews. The 'news' reporting is little better that you'd get in The Stun or The Daily Fail.
Are there still milkman about? I thought they had disappeared as everyone buys milk at their supermarket now?
Anyway this guy is a great advert for one. Not.
He should be in prison.
When I was a schoolboy, I had a job on a milk float. It was commonplace for the float to crawl along residential streets at 10mph, often on the wrong side of the road, to facilitate the delivery lads getting on and off with fresh crates/ baskets of milk. Nothing untoward ever happened.
The driver back then was fully aware of the danger, but he always had his dipped lights on and I simply cannot see how any cyclist could have ridden into him - in this case, we don't have the full facts, and the driver was likely in shock immediately after the incident. People say, and do, daft things in shock.
cyclist is an idiot for having no lights, however, replace cyclist with pedestrian. Would the outcome have been different??
The one case I can recall was this one which, apparently, had no prosecution:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2274372/Churchill-insurance-appe...
Sounds like the Milkman was in shock.
I'm going to be controversial here - but cyclists without lights riding in the dark, can be very hard to spot. if this was truly the case here, then I have sympathy for the milkman.
I do recall this 6 months ago and that the rider was in the pitch black with no lights, milkman is of course guilty for leaving the scene of the incident and potentially for crawling along the wrong side of the road.
http://www.liverpoolecho.co.uk/news/liverpool-news/liverpool-submariner-...
Suggests we should read a little more about this case. I've no idea why sentencing did not take place for 6 months mind.
The suggestion is that he was turning and, as a consequence, on the wrong side of the road. The cyclist had no lights at 6.15 am on a February morning.
Remember that the jury heard all the evidence here and cleared him. We did not.
Yeah I guess not having lights on means its acceptable to treat the cyclist as little more than road kill. I'm sure the jury were mainly drivers so they would have found that behaviour perfectly acceptable, it was only a cyclist after all.
How are his actions following the collision, however poor, evidence of dangerous driving?
There not, I just hope he get the same treatment at some point in the future.
"'Cyclists, they are dangerous on the road - they do not pay attention.'"
Said the Guy driving on the wrong side of the road not paying attention to on coming traffic..........