Banned driver who abandoned injured friends after crash jailed
A TERRIFIED pedestrian dived for safety behind a lamp-post as a speeding car came hurtling towards him on the outskirts of Solihull.
The car, driven by banned driver Robert Wood, hit the lamp-post in Dickens Heath Road, bounced off it and ended up hanging over a ditch.
Wood fled, abandoning his injured passengers, but later handed himself in.
At Warwick Crown Court Wood, 19, of Belston Road, Kings Heath, was sentenced to nine months’ detention and banned for two years after pleading guilty to dangerous driving and driving while disqualified.
Prosecutor Tim Pole said police officers on patrol in Shirley decided to follow the Renault Clio because it was being driven erratically.
When it went onto the wrong side of the road to overtake other traffic on the approach to another roundabout the officers put on their blue light and siren to get it to stop.
Instead the Clio, driven by Wood, made off and went the wrong way round the next two roundabouts.
It got 12 to 15 seconds ahead of the police car and reached speeds of up to 70mph in a 30mph zone as Wood headed to Shirley Heath and then towards Dickens Heath.
But when the officers drove along Dickens Heath Road they were flagged down by a pedestrian who told them he had seen the Clio crash.
The badly shaken man said that the car had come round the corner ‘at a tremendous speed’ and seemed to be heading straight for him.
Fearing for his life, he said he dived behind a lamp-post which the car then hit before careering off and ending up hanging over a ditch.
The officers went over to the car where they found Wood had abandoned his three injured passengers, two of whom had been flung out by the force of the impact, and run off across a field.
But Wood, who had a previous conviction for driving while disqualified, handed himself in a week later.
Paul John, defending, said: “He should not have been driving, and when he realised he had been seen by the police he panicked.
“He is mortified at the way he behaved by leaving his friends in the car.”
But Judge Marten Coates told Wood: “There was a crash, and two of your passengers were thrown out and were found unconscious on the ground, and another was trapped in the car.
“You also endangered one member of the public who thought you were going to collide with him, and you collided with the lamp-post he was sheltering behind.”
