Claire Mercer’s husband, Jason, died when a lorry ploughed into his stationary vehicle on the M1 near Sheffield last year
The widow of a man killed on a smart motorway has insisted Highways England is responsible for her husband’s death after a judge said he would be alive today if there had been a hard shoulder.
Claire Mercer’s husband Jason, 44, and Alexandru Murgeanu, 22, died when a lorry ploughed into their stationary vehicles on the M1 near Sheffield on June 7 last year. The men had stopped on the inside lane to exchange details after a “minor shunt”.
The lorry driver Prezemyslaw Zbigniew Szuba, 40, was jailed for 10 months for causing the mens’ deaths after driving at 56mph without due care and attention.
Sheffield Crown Court heard he had up to five seconds to spot the stationary vehicles and take evasive action, but failed to do so. The two men died one mile from an emergency refuge area on a stretch of motorway where the hard shoulder had been turned into a live lane.
Jason Mercer, and Claire Mercer, his grieving widow, after he was killed on a smart motorway. She has launched a legal fight to wipe them off the map
The men were the third and fourth people to die on the stretch of smart motorway in 10 months.
The majority of the hearing at Sheffield Crown Court focused on the “inadequacies” of smart motorways as Judge Jeremy Richardson QC, described hard shoulders as similar to lifeboats on ships: no one wants to use them but it is “reassuring” they are there.
Read full article here -> https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/10/19/smart-motorway-widow-insists-highways-england-responsible-death/
PDF version here ->https://smartmotorwayskill.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/Smart-motorway-widow-insists-Highways-England-is-responsible-for-his-death.pdf