Family death crash trucker guilty

A jury at Oxford Crown Court convicted Ian King, 61, of Groby in Leicestershire, of four counts of causing death by dangerous driving.

The court heard how he ploughed into a line of traffic on the A34 near Bicester, Oxfordshire, on the afternoon of July 31 last year.

Among the vehicles was a Peugeot 307 containing Malcolm Dowling, 46, his wife Janice, 42, and their sons Richard, 16, and George, 11, travelling home to Lichfield in Staffordshire following a family holiday in France. They all died.

The jury took two hours and 15 minutes to reach the guilty verdicts.

King was on the return leg of a trip from Leicester to Southampton to deliver a stone crushing machine when the crash happened. He had been up since about 4.30am and had been driving with breaks since before 7am that day, the trial was told.

His articulated lorry caused a multiple pile-up, hitting a Ford Focus before shunting a Renault Laguna over the Dowlings' Peugeot.

The 30-tonne vehicle then rode over the Peugeot and into the back of a car transporter lorry, the court heard. King denied the charges, maintaining that he simply did not know what happened.

The trial heard how King suffers from sleep apnoea, a respiratory condition which disrupts sleep and can cause drowsiness.

The Crown said King would have been aware he was getting drowsy but he failed to take appropriate steps to avoid falling asleep at the wheel, with tragic consequences.