SPEEDING ALLEGED

Evening Post, Volume CXXI, Issue 104, 4 May 1936, Page 11

SPEEDING ALLEGED

LOWER HUTT ACCIDENT

TAXI-DRIVER CHARGED

Excessive speed was the allegation upon which the Crown based its case in the Supreme Court today against Owen Lester Sieyers Jarrett, who. was charged with negligently driving a car at Lower Hutt, thereby causing the deaths of Lillias Ellen Lowery and Charles Mildenhall. He pleaded not guilty and was represented by Mr. \V. P. Rollings.

At about 8.25 p.m. on January 18, said Mr. C. Evans Scott, in outlining the case for the prosecution, the accused, who was a taxi-driver, was driving Mr. and Mrs. Wilson in his eightcylindered taxi from Lower Hutt to the Wellington Hospital, where their daughter 'was lying dangerously ill. He was proceeding on his correct side of the Hutt Road. Mrs. Lowery, in a baby car, was driving in the opposite direction and shortly before the accident she was on her correct side, and her speed was about ten to fifteen miles an hour. She had the intention of turning into Beaumont Avenue, a side street which joined the Hutt Road at an angle not a right angle, and she turned her car to the right, across the Hutt Road. She appeared to have miscalculated the speed at which the accused's car was approaching and when she had proceeded about threequarters of the way across the Hutt Road a collision took place. Her car capsized and came to rest sixty-six feet from the point of impact in the" direction ' from which she had come. The passenger, Mr. Mildenhall, was thrown out of her car and was found fifteen feet beyond it, and eighty-one feet from the point of impact. Both he and Mrs. Lowery died. The accused's car left the road, grazed a telegraph post, mounted the kerb, and came' to rest in a vacant section 138 feet from the point of impact. i "The Crown's case is that the accused was driving at an excessive speed," said Mr. Evans Scott. The accused himself had admitted a speed of over thirty-five miles an hour and the Crown's case was that his speed was very considerably in excess or that. That submission was helped by the fact that the car had travelled 138 feet after the impact, with both brakes applied, according to the accused's statement.

Witnesses were called for the Crown, (Proceeding.)