Not a nice story, this- a lorry driver who fell asleep at the wheel and killed a 55 year-old woman was diagnosed as suffering from Obstructive Sleep Apnea. He went free (and rightly so), but the warning is a stark one.
The driver, Robert Earnshaw (42) was found innocent of all charges of dangerous driving, because he was diagnosed with the condition. In his account to the court, he said he had slept for twenty minutes in a service station before going back out onto the road, and reports no memory whatsoever of the tragic events that followed, which killed Susan Clark at the scene, and could have killed more (the crash was a six-car pile-up).
Mrs Clark’s children, Sarah Richards and Jason Clark, have been told that this tragic scenario is likely to play itself out again, somewhere else on Britain’s roads.
When interviewed by Wales on Sunday, Mr Clarke is reported asked “How does someone go from awake to asleep in a matter of seconds? He didn’t even realise. He said it was completely out of the blue.”
When informed of the diagnosis of Sleep Apnea, Mr Clarke is reported as saying “If that is true, how many other people on the roads have this condition? If the experts are right, it could happen again.”
He’s now campaigning to raise awareness of the condition, to try and get some good out of the situation. If there’s a lesson to be learned from this, it’s that if you think you have a medical issue that’s disrupting your sleep, shouldn’t you be doing something about it?
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