Three people were killed and several others injured when a lorry ploughed into a queue of stationary traffic on a motorway on 15 July 2021. The HGV driver who caused the accident had been browsing dating sites on his phone, therefore he didn’t notice the slow-moving traffic in time.
BBC’s documentary “Deadly Browsing – The Lorry Driver” features not only those who were involved in the accident, and the relatives of the fatalities, but also Ion Nicu Onut, the HGV driver who is serving his nine-year-long prison sentence.
According to his phone recordings, Onut was accessing dating sites on his phone for about 40 minutes before the crash, which killed three people on the spot.
“To be on the phone for two or three seconds, if you drive 60mph you can travel a few hundred yards definitely. The phone was a distraction. It was a bad choice, a really bad choice. It was the wrong time and the wrong place it just happened,” says the driver in the documentary.
When asked what he would say to the families of the victims he broke down in tears:
“There is a million things I can tell people but I want to apologise. I want to say I am really sorry because I feel really bad for what happened,” – he said. “I feel bad for the people who lost their loved ones, and the people that were injured and had to suffer with back flashes and injuries for the rest of their lives.”
“It’s hard, it’s truly hard to accept that plus living for the rest of your life with that in your head is not easy either. I don’t know what else to say,” he added.
Durham Constabulary published a long part of the documentary on its Facebook page, hoping that the distressing pictures and interviews will serve as a warning to others.
“We hope this film highlights just how devastating using a mobile phone or other device at the wheel of a vehicle can be – in one split second, your life and other innocent people’s lives might never be the same again,” said Detective Constable Natalie Horner, from Durham Constabulary’s Collision Investigation Unit”. “Please, put the phone down while driving.”