Telford lorry driver gets suspended sentence over M25 death crash

Anthony Cheshire, 63, of Reynards Coppice, Sutton Hill, crashed his lorry into a car, which had run out of petrol.

The car driver was jailed for three years for causing the death of one of the passengers, while Cheshire received a four-month prison sentence, suspended for two years.

Londoner Tammy Langton, 33, was convicted after a trial in February of causing the death of her cousin Laura Cooper, 35, of Leicester, by careless driving when having more than the specified limit of cannabis in her body.

Laura Cooper was killed after Langton’s car ran out of fuel on the M25 and was hit by Cheshire’s lorry.

Jurors heard Langton had to pull over in the early hours on an unlit section of the clockwise M25 between junctions 26 and 27 in Essex where there was no hard shoulder when her Nissan Note ran out of fuel.

The stranded vehicle, with two other passengers inside, was protruding more than one metre into the nearside lane of the four-lane carriageway and was struck from behind at 56mph by a Scania R620, driven by Cheshire at 2am, on March 29, 2016.

Ms Cooper had been sitting in the rear seat when she suffered fatal injuries and died a few days later in hospital. Judge Jonathan Seely, sitting at Chelmsford Crown Court, said Langton had “deliberately chosen to run out of petrol on a motorway at night”.

He said she thought an emergency organisation such as the AA or RAC “would come to sort out the problem”.

He continued: “You drove a substantial distance, past a service station and past numerous exits where you could have left the motorway safely.

“You continued to drive knowing that you were about to run out of petrol and you couldn’t possibly complete your journey. You drove in lane three and were overtaking vehicles at a time when you knew your car was going to run out of petrol on a motorway which is particularly dark and unilluminated in places.” The judge said Langton had twice the legal limit of cannabis in her system having last smoked a joint 12 hours before the crash.

Front passenger Yasmin Fry, then 17, Ms Cooper’s goddaughter, also suffered serious injuries and Langton herself was hurt. Ms Cooper’s son Josh, 18, was also a passenger but was not injured.

Cheshire, who was found not guilty of causing serious injury by dangerous driving to Langton or Ms Fry by the jury, was disqualified from driving for 12 months and ordered to carry out 200 hours unpaid work. Judge Seely said Cheshire had suffered a momentary lapse of concentration after he saw Langton’s vehicle in view but had not reacted in time.