For Maya Foa, the image of her mother’s shattered body, the cycling helmet
she always wore for protection crushed into her skull, is a memory that will
never fade.
Equally vivid is her anger at what she sees as a miscarriage of justice over
her mother’s death – one of “too many” killings of cyclists by lorries, as
the coroner said at the inquest.
Emma Foa, 56, was thrown off her bike and crushed by a two-ton cement mixer
lorry at a junction near King’s Cross in north London on the morning of
December 21 last year.
The driver was oblivious to her as he turned left, even though they had been
stationary side by side for 38 seconds at the traffic lights and several
witnesses honked and shouted as they saw what was happening. An inquest
would later be told that he was sorting papers in his cab as he turned the
corner.
Maya, 23, a student at Oxford University, was down for the holidays when the
police arrived at the family house in Hampstead, north London, with the news
that there had been “a terrible accident”. Her stepfather, Reg Wright,
collapsed when she telephoned him at his office with the news.
Initially, they did not want to believe it. Maya recalled: “When Reg and I
drove to the morgue we actually talked about how it was all a mistake,
reassuring ourselves because Emma had been cycling for 20 years and was
incredibly careful, saying we were going to bring her home.”
Over the following months Maya, her sister Lia, 25, and Wright, 53, would
learn how little value the law placed on the life of Foa, a jewellery maker
and author. And they found themselves joining the relatives of similar
victims in a campaign for changes in the law.
Emma had been killed only four days before Christmas. “This delayed the
funeral and the police could not interview the driver of the cement mixer
until he returned from honeymoon,” Maya said.
“It was surreal – and never more so than when the police liaison officer told
me that there was no question of a manslaughter charge because the law is
not about consequences but about intent.”
Maya decided: “The only thing I could do was to try to make sure my mother’s
life was honoured with proper justice.” She got all the information
available from the police, viewed the CCTV footage of the accident and
looked at photographs – including the one of her crushed mother. She read
witness statements. “Being pro-active seemed the one way I might be able to
have our case treated as a killing, not as a fatality.”
To her dismay the driver, Michael Thorn, 52, was charged only with the minor
offence of driving without due care and attention.
Then at the initial pretrial hearing Thorn did not turn up. “We waited, but
neither he nor the defence appeared. There was just a note saying he was
pleading not guilty – he only changed his plea to guilty when he had seen
the CCTV footage of what happened.”
Adding insult to injury, Judge Anthony Evans chose to sentence Thorn at what
was supposed to be another pretrial hearing for the plea to be established,
rather than setting a date when the family would be present.
Wright, his voice cracked with tears, says: “We were devastated when we learnt
that Thorn had been tried as a hasty formality. Couldn’t the judge have
understood how important it was for the family to attend? And Judge Evans
referred to what happened as ‘an inadvertence’. My wife’s death was not an
inadvertence. It happened because Thorn did not bother to check his mirror
or look outside his cab. Emma was stationary alongside him at the lights for
38 seconds.”
Thorn was fined £300 with £100 costs and allowed to keep his licence.
“That was the value of my mother’s life,” Maya said. “I believed in this
country that killing people was taken seriously. But Thorn was charged with
a very minor offence that does not take into account that someone has died.
The killing of my mother was lumped together with minor speeding, clipping a
wing mirror, bumping into a traffic bollard.”
Deaths such as Emma Foa’s are almost always treated as minor offences. Cynthia
Barlow, a scientist at Imperial College, took up campaigning after her
daughter, Alex Jane McVitty, 26, was killed in almost identical
circumstances in 2000.
Barlow remembered angrily: “The driver claimed he had a blind spot in his
mirror, but the police said this was untrue. Even so, he was acquitted. I
saw then that it is possible to kill someone and be in no way held
accountable or expected to make sure you can see. A blind spot should not be
a defence if you drive several tons of heavy metal.”
She added: “The Crown Prosecution Service hardly ever prosecutes and when it
does it is almost always for careless driving, although you might think
failing to look in a mirror properly, or [making] sure you knew if there was
somebody alongside, would constitute dangerous driving. These cases are the
only killings to be heard in a magistrate’s court and the penalties are
derisory. Every other kind of killing goes to a high court.”
That was demonstrated again last week when a verdict of accidental death was
brought in the case of researcher Amelia Zollner, 24, who was crushed to
death in Russell Square, central London, when the driver of a lorry failed
to see her in his wing mirror earlier this year.
Last year Conrad Dutoit died when he was hit by a turning heavy goods vehicle
(HGV). The driver was not licensed to drive that kind of lorry, yet he was
fined just £500 and disqualified for 56 days. The driver of a lorry that
killed a young woman cycling near King’s Cross last year was held not guilty
because the cyclist had been listening to an iPod.
I, too, could have been one of these deaths. I was knocked off my bike a
couple of years ago by an HGV turning sharply left but was lucky enough to
be flung onto the pavement, leaving me bruised but alive.
Every year about 150 cyclists are killed on the road. One cyclist is killed or
seriously injured every day in London. In urban areas about half of
cyclists’ deaths are caused by HGVs – most frequently when they turn left. A
third more men than women die on the roads, but when women are killed it is
most likely to be by HGVs.
Transport for London (TfL), which has responsibility for the capital’s roads,
concluded that this is because women cyclists are law-abiding. They are less
likely than men to jump the lights or cycle aggressively to get ahead of
lorries.
After her daughter’s death Barlow wrote to the firm employing the driver, but
“they said ‘it’s nothing to do with us’.” Barlow did not give up: “I decided
then I would make it something to do with them.”
She bought shares in RMC, the parent firm of Readymix, the cement company,
attended shareholders’ meetings and battled to get its lorries fitted with
adequate mirrors and sensors to trigger an alarm in the cab if a cyclist is
alongside. “All their lorries now have them and so far as I know there have
been no fatal collisions with their vehicles since these were fitted,” she
said.
Under European Union law, most HGVs registered must have wide-angle mirrors,
known as close proximity mirrors, fitted by March 31, 2009. Wright has
joined campaigners pushing to have them made compulsory immediately – along
with sensors and compulsory training for drivers in using them.
The controversy has arisen at the same time as cycling lobbies campaign to get
the public on their bikes. Cycling England, the government-backed
organisation, says a 20% increase in cycling could save the taxpayer £520m,
lowering healthcare costs, fighting obesity, reducing congestion and cutting
54m car journeys a year by 2012. More ambitiously, the TfL cycling action
plan aims to achieve an 80% increase in cycling levels in London by 2010.
Charlie Lloyd, of the London Cycling Campaign, said: “Cycling is not as
dangerous as people may think when they hear of the fatalities, but we
absolutely support things being done to make it safer in the way it is in
continental countries where drivers have far more respect for cyclists and
are also held far more accountable than here if they kill or injure someone,
and they face severe penalties.”
The campaign group RoadPeace would like to see driver liability for civil
compensation brought in as it is in Europe. With construction work for the
2012 Olympics likely to bring a great many more HGVs onto London’s roads,
Brenda Puech at RoadPeace emphasises how urgent it is that drivers are made
to take the consequences of their negligent driving more seriously.
Wright, facing the painful first anniversary of his wife’s death, believes
there must be criminal responsibility, too. He asked: “How can a driver not
be made to face the significance of causing a death? Perhaps he should
understand what it is to have all the joy and light somebody brought into
life ended just like that.”
Earlier this month Thorn attended Emma Foa’s inquest where the coroner, Dr
Andrew Reid, said he had presided over too many inquests caused by
collisions between lorries and cyclists. Afterwards, Lia and Maya went up to
Thorn, who mumbled “sorry”; both shook his hand.
Maya recalls: “It was a way of putting an end to it but I am disillusioned and
I have no fight left. Emma was the glue that bound us. Now we are a crippled
gathering of people, not a family, and I have to get on with finding a way
to live. But inside there is this tragic emptiness.”
