In depressing news, it has been found that a girl died after a lorry driver – who was looking at porn - crashed into the car she was in. Laura Thomas and fiancé Lewis Pagett were in a broken-down Vauxhall on the hard shoulder of a road near Shrewsbury, calling emergency services on a mobile when Ian Glover’s lorry hit them, sending the car over the safety barrier. Emergency crews were called to the scene last July, but Laura couldn’t be saved and died on the way to hospital.
It's now emerged that Ian Glover had been looking through photos of women on explicit dating sites behind the wheel.
Lewis told Shrewsbury Crown Court his fiancé's death left him devestated. ‘Laura and I were looking forward to planning our wedding together – instead, I ended up planning her funeral,’ he said. ‘We had known each other since we were 13, and we were so excited to spend the rest of our lives together… It is devastating to discover that Glover had been looking at dating sites when he hit our car – the crash was completely avoidable.’
Laura’s mum, Lisa, is disturbed by the new evidence he was watching porn. ‘It makes me feel sick that Glover killed my girl while looking at porn. He accessed sites such as ‘Shagaholic.co.uk’ and ‘Sexuk.com’ around 11 times in less than a mile radius – why would someone be looking at such sites while driving,’ she said to The Mirror. ‘Glover didn’t have enough time to look up and see Lewis’s car as he was distracted for around 19 seconds – if you close your eyes and count to 19 you’ll realise it’s such a long period of time not to look at the road.’
Glover told police that he couldn’t remember what happened before the crash. However, tests on three phones found in his lorry showed he was on various dating sites. ‘You were on these sites at the point of impact,’ Judge Robin Onions told Glover in court. ‘For many miles, you were not paying proper attention. This was utterly avoidable.’
Laura's family have set up a charity in her memory and aim to raise awareness of the distractions of using a mobile phone at the wheel. Glover has been sentenced to five years in prison.
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Picture: Caters
This article originally appeared on The Debrief.