Dangerous driver who smashed into pregnant Cumbrian woman’s car jailed

By Staff Reporter

Last updated at 11:29, Thursday, 02 August 2012

A speeding driver who crashed into a pregnant woman’s car after going round a roundabout on two wheels has been sent to prison for 15 months.

Mark Bromley was also banned from driving for two and a half years after being found guilty by a jury at Carlisle Crown Court of dangerous driving.

The jury of nine men and three women took less than half an hour to reach their unanimous verdict – a sign, Judge Paul Batty QC said, of the weight of evidence against the 34-year-old drug addict.

“The evidence was overwhelming,” the judge told him. “You should have pleaded guilty a long time ago but you wouldn’t.”

Judge Batty told Bromley, who lives in Main Road, Harrington, it was clear he had been driving “at a furious speed” when he lost control of his Volvo V40 and crashed head-on into a Fiat Punto driven by Lynsey McCarron, who was heavily pregnant.

Passing sentence, Judge Batty told him: “Ms McCarron could so easily have lost her child and in fact could so easily have lost her life. You are fortunate in the extreme that you are not facing a charge of causing death by dangerous driving.”

The court heard that Ms McCarron was trapped in the wreckage and had to be cut out by firefighters after the crash at the roundabout on Moorclose Road in Workington.

She suffered two broken bones in her neck, but doctors were more concerned about the fate of her unborn baby.

Ms McCarron told the jury during the trial that, happily, her baby daughter had not been harmed.

“And I have recovered – the bones have healed although I am still in a lot of pain,” she said.

Bromley, who at the time of the crash on the afternoon of April 6 last year was out on licence from a 42-month prison sentence imposed for puncturing a 14-year-old boy’s lung by stabbing him in the chest, had claimed the accident was caused not by his bad driving, but by a burst tyre as he approached the roundabout.

First published at 11:26, Thursday, 02 August 2012
Published by http://www.newsandstar.co.uk