Coroner raises concerns over new drivers taking passengers after north Wales crash

A coroner has raised concerns about young, newly qualified drivers being allowed to carry passengers, during an inquest into the deaths of four teenagers who drowned after a crash in north Wales.

Hugo Morris, 18, Harvey Owen, 17, Wilf Fitchett, 17, and Jevon Hirst, 16, died in November last year on a camping trip to Eryri national park (Snowdonia) when their car came off a rural road on a bend and ended up upside-down in a water-filled ditch.

The silver Ford Fiesta was being driven by Hugo, who had passed his driving test six months earlier, and the inquest heard he probably lost control of the vehicle when he approached the bend “a little bit too quickly and understeered”.

The senior coroner for north-west Wales, Kate Robertson, said she would write to the Department for Transport and the DVLA to raise concerns that deaths could continue to occur where “young, newly qualified drivers are permitted to carry passengers”.

Speaking outside court, Harvey’s mother, Crystal Owen, said her son had been “let down by an outdated driving licence system”.

Owen, who has been campaigning for graduated driving licences for new drivers, said: “My son was able to get in the back of a car driven by a young, inexperienced driver and be driven on an unfamiliar rural road without my knowledge.”

Wilf’s mother, Heather Sanderson, said: “We gave Wilf permission to go because we believed that the driver had passed his driving test, which he had, and we were more than happy. We had done our research and I think we would make the decision again, not knowing the outcome. I don’t think our decision was flawed.”

The bodies of the teenagers were discovered in the partly submerged vehicle in a ditch swollen with water, two days after they were last seen in Porthmadog on 19 November last year.

The discovery followed an extensive search for the boys when they failed to return to their homes in Shrewsbury. The crashed car could not be seen from the road and was spotted by the passenger of a refuse recycling truck driving past.

The cause of death for all four teenagers was recorded as drowning , and postmortems found none of them had any significant internal or external injuries.

The North Wales police forensic collision investigator, Ian Thompson, said there was an “understeer” of the car as it navigated a bend on a 60mph road, and he calculated its maximum theoretical speed as 38mph.

“Having driven the bend myself, the fastest speed I felt comfortable negotiating the bend was 26mph,” he said.

The inquest heard there were “no catastrophic mechanical failures” with the car and Thompson said he believed the crash had been “avoidable”.

He added that he did not believe the rainy weather or leaves on the road caused the crash, and that police records did not show any previous fatal or serious collisions on the bend.

The court heard that extra signage and chevrons had been put in place after the collision but a broken fence, which had apparently been damaged in an earlier crash, had still not been replaced and was on land not owned by the council.

The coroner said this would be included in a prevention of future deaths report, and she recorded a conclusion of road traffic collision.

“I find that all four young men would have died very soon following the collision, given the postmortem findings, and that they died by drowning,” Robertson said.