A tearful lorry driver has admitted that a nursery teacher would still be alive if he’d used his wing mirror and understood a warning sign.
John O’Donnell, 52, shed tears as he told the jury that he thinks about Chloe Morrison “every day” after the 26-year-old was fatally struck on her back by the protruding offloader leg.
Ms Morrison suffered multiple fractures when she was hit as she walked with her mum along a pavement at Kerrowdown, just outside Drumnadrochit.
She was flung 35-metres along a pavement in front of the lorry which also ran over her leg.
The charge claims that O’Donnell unlocked the offloader legs and failed to secure them before moving off from Kilmuir Cemetery on the Isle of Skye.
It’s alleged that he then failed to see they were insecure when he filled up at a petrol station in Broadford, causing the nearside leg to become fully extended and locked in position.
But O’Donnell denied ever touching the operating mechanism and was at a loss to explain how one had come loose.
Earlier in the trial before Lord Stuart, the court heard that there were yellow warning signs on the outriggers to show that they were unlocked and that one could be seen in O’Donnell’s nearside wing mirror.
He added he used his wing mirrors a lot on his way back to his Oldmeldrum base because the road was so narrow but was mostly focused on what was ahead of him.
A tearful O’Donnell said he didn’t know what the yellow signs meant but agreed with defence counsel Tony Graham QC that if he had and had seen it in his mirror “then Chloe Morrison would still be here today”.
He told the jury: “I don’t know how I missed it. I heard a noise and I stopped. I couldn’t believe what happened. I couldn’t understand why it (the outrigger) came out because no one had it out. I think about it every day.”
He denied ever touching the locking mechanism of the outriggers but admitted he had dropped the stabiliser legs after being asked to.
‘I have lost faith in myself’
He had been dropping off ducts for fibre optic cabling on Skye but another grab vehicle had done the lifting, the trial was told.
O’Donnell said: “The legs going down are independent of the outriggers. It is different levers and one of the other boys there showed me how to do it. I wasn’t allowed to touch the outriggers.”
He said he couldn’t have extended the outriggers in any case because the grab lorry had extended its stabilisers and there was no room.
“I was asked to put down the legs to steady my lorry as it was blowing a gale that day. I don’t know if anyone else touched them,” he told the jury at the High Court in Inverness.
O’Donnell confirmed he had driven HGVs since he was 18 but had no accidents and had a clean licence.
But since the tragedy he has stopped.
“I have lost faith in myself. I had to stop. I don’t have anything left in me to drive HGVs,” he concluded.
Closing speeches due
Advocate depute David Dickson asked O’Donnell if he operated the legs up and down, then he must have been in the vicinity of the outrigger’s operating levers.
O’Donnell agreed but added he did not touch them: “I had no reason to.”
O’Donnell said there were other displays of yellow on the lorry which did not indicate anything was going to fail of or that anything was wrong.
Mr Graham asked: “In the transport industry, is yellow synonymous with danger?”
His client replied: “No.”
The trial, before Lord Stuart, continues.
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