A delivery driver hit and killed a drunken man who was lying in the middle of the road seconds after checking his phone behind the wheel, a court has heard.
Joseph Sureshkumar, 50, was driving a white Sprinter van along Willow Tree Lane in Hayes, west London, just before 4.30am on October 14 last year when he ran over Jonathan Fernando.
Mr Fernando, 37, was ‘intoxicated’ after a night out and had stumbled to the ground five minutes before the City Sprint driver made his way along the stretch of road.
The Old Bailey heard Sureshkumar had three mobile phones on his dashboard at the time of the incident, and examinations showed he had been looking at Youtube and Whatsapp seconds before the collision.
Prosecutor Ben Holt told jurors the driver had initially denied hitting Mr Fernando with his vehicle, saying he noticed the man on the ground and had carried out a U-turn to check up on him.
Sureshkumar said he had driven away after speaking to another man who he thought was calling the emergency services, Mr Holt explained.
He continued: ‘One of the matters you might have to ask yourself in this case, what was it that could have caused him, but not the other motorists, to hit Mr Fernando?
‘When the defendant’s van was seized on his arrest, three mobile telephones were noted as being present within the vehicle, they were on the dashboard effectively behind the steering wheel.
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‘They were all examined by the police in order to work out when they had been used.’
The prosecutor told the jury the examination found that ‘about 13 seconds or so before the collision’, one of the phones lit up on the Youtube app and a few seconds later with Whatsapp.
Mr Holt said: ‘That telephone evidence we say explains why it was that this defendant did not stop for Mr Fernando, but those latter motorists did.
‘It is the prosecution’s case that he was avoidably and needlessly distracted from the road at hand.
‘We cannot say what he was doing on YouTube and we cannot say that he interacted with anyone on WhatsApp but the point we make is that he was fiddling with his phone prior to the collision, and indeed he continued to do so after this collision.
‘Being so avoidably distracted we say, results in this episode of dangerous driving.’
Sureshkumar denies causing death by dangerous driving. He admits the lesser offence of causing death by careless driving.
The trial continues.
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