‘How could something as simple as picking up a phone be the cause of my daughter’s death?’
It was the school summer holiday, August 2016. Kate Goldsmith, mother to 13-year-old Jake and 11-year-old Aimee, was in the bathroom at home in Harlington, Bedfordshire, getting ready for bed when she heard a car pull up outside. The children were on a camping holiday in Devon with their father, Mark, his partner Tracey and her two boys, Ethan, 13, Jake’s best friend since nursery school, and Josh, 11. Aimee had texted the night before to say they might be coming back early, but neither Aimee, Jake nor Mark had been answering her texts that day. The doorbell went. Police officers stood on the step. There had been a fatal collision. Aimee had been killed.
‘It is a moment in your lifetime that you never, ever get over. Change is not big enough of a word. It’s like your life up to that point has ended,’ says Kate.
‘Your mind is screaming “Stop it! Rewind. Rewind. Don’t let this be happening.” Something inside you is trying to claw back the time, to make it not real, to make it not be happening.’
The family had, in fact, decided to come home early, split between two cars, Mark with Jake and the camping equipment in a trailer, and Aimee, Josh and Ethan with two dogs in Tracey’s car. The crash had happened on the A34 in Berkshire. It was a pile-up.
‘And then I said, “What about Jake? What about Jake?”’
The police officers looked at one another. ‘What car was he in?’ they asked. They began to make frantic calls.
‘It was every parent’s worst nightmare. It felt like forever, but it was probably minutes. I had lost one child and here I was waiting to find out if my other child was still alive.’
Mark’s Vauxhall Zafira had been rammed violently from behind. There were several cars involved. Tracey’s Corsa was travelling in the traffic in front and was hit. Her boot flew open and the two dogs flew out on to the bonnet of Mark’s car. Tracey’s car, carrying the three other children, was pushed under the heavy goods vehicle in front, its roof crumpling under the lorry’s chassis. Analysis later showed it had been compressed to a third of its normal size. Tracey, Ethan, Josh and Aimee were killed.
Mark and Jake only had minor injuries. Jake was brought home that night, discharged from hospital. He could not speak about what had happened. His trauma and shock would last years.
‘We would sit on the sofa without speaking. And we slept next to one another, holding hands, me on the floor of his room. It was as if we couldn’t bear to be parted.’
Today, we are in the same living room, seven years on, surrounded by pictures of Aimee and Jake. Next week, Aimee would have been 19. Saturday is Josh’s birthday. He too would be turning 19. After I leave, Kate and Jake will go to the children’s commemorative bench at nearby Dunstable Downs. Doug (Ethan and Josh’s father) will be there and together they will mark Josh’s 19th birthday: ‘We do it every year for all the children.’
A week or so after losing Aimee, Kate’s phone rang. Footage had been recovered from the dash cam of a lorry further back in the pile-up; there was some information the police would like to share with them.
The lorry’s dash-cam footage showed that the driver, 30-year-old Tomasz Kroker, had been on his phone, scrolling through music. The court would later hear that Kroker had barely glanced at the road for 1km. He had spent 45 seconds looking at the phone’s screen so that when the traffic had slowed, he was unable to respond, smashing into the vehicle in front at 50mph, causing the fatal domino effect. He would eventually be convicted of causing death by dangerous driving and sentenced to 10 years in prison, with the judge saying his attention had been so poor ‘he might as well have had his eyes closed’.
Kate recalls hearing the news of the cause of her daughter’s death: ‘I almost had empathy for the driver at first. It didn’t last but my initial reaction was, he hadn’t gone out on purpose to do this. I had seen people on the phone while driving their cars all the time. I still see them.
‘I remember saying to the police, “I don’t understand, I don’t understand.” How could something as simple as somebody picking up a phone be the cause of the death of my daughter?’
Next month marks the 20th anniversary of the ban on ‘interactive’ handheld mobile phone use in vehicles. In the years since, there has been a profound change in the sophistication of the mobile phone and the social media it enables. Now more than ever before, people consider them essential to daily life. In a 2017 poll for the AA Charitable Trust (based on 17,979 drivers) more than half of young drivers (51 per cent) said they couldn’t bring themselves to turn off their phones before driving; nor could 21 per cent of the general driving population.
And although people seem to understand, in theory, that using a phone behind the wheel is more likely to cause an accident than drink driving (reaction times are twice as slow when on the phone than when under the influence, research from the Transport Research Laboratory shows), more people still use their phone while driving. This is because, despite high-profile cases such Kroker’s conviction, it still lacks the social stigma of drink driving, even though it is just as lethal.
Over the years, there have been various safety campaigns such as Highways England’s Operation Tramline, which involved officers roaming the roads in unmarked lorry cabs filming drivers using their mobiles. That campaign revealed the biggest road safety problem by far to be phone use at the wheel. In a 2019 survey for Brake, the road safety charity, and Direct Line, four per cent of drivers – the equivalent of more than 1.5 million licence holders – claimed it was not at all distracting to message or text on a phone while driving. Five per cent of people thought it was acceptable to have a phone conversation. But what about those of us who are hazy about the law? Or who think along the lines of ‘just once won’t hurt’?
A quick call answered at red traffic lights just to say, ‘I’ll you call you back – I’m driving’? Illegal. A brief text saying, ‘Running late. Be there in 15 mins.’ Illegal. Changing music on your phone, like Kroker did? Illegal.
Even momentary lapses of concentration can be fatal. Stationary traffic makes no difference to the criminal offence. Only last month, the designer Cath Kidston MBE was fined £666 and banned from driving for six months after a police officer caught her in her Mercedes checking a message on her mobile while stuck in traffic near Hyde Park. The six penalty points she got, when added to the six she already had for speeding, led to disqualification.
Department for Transport statistics make for a depressing read: in 2020, 17 people were killed, 114 seriously injured and 385 slightly injured in road traffic accidents where a driver was using a mobile phone. Last month also saw another tragedy in the headlines: 22-year-old Adil Iqbal had been filming himself on his phone erratically weaving between cars at speeds of up to 123 mph on the M66 in Bury. He lost control and smashed into a pregnant woman, Frankie Jules-Hough, 38, parked on the hard shoulder with a flat tyre. She suffered unsurvivable brain injuries and her unborn daughter died with her two days later. Both her nine-year-old son and her nephew, in the car, also suffered brain injuries and spent weeks in intensive care.
The crime was deemed so recklessly shocking that last month Iqbal had his prison sentence increased from 12 to 15 years.
In March 2022, the law was tightened up in response to the Government’s realisation that ‘the array of functions that mobile phones can now perform has outgrown the wording of the offence and its parameters’. In 2019, a driver caught by police filming the aftermath of a nearby road accident on his phone had his conviction overturned because filming was not ‘interactive’. (Iqbal’s filming of himself, taken alone, would not have been deemed ‘interactive’ either.) The law changed as a result. Now, you can’t do anything on your handheld phone in the car except phoning 999 in an emergency or paying for goods with contactless while stationary (say at a drive-thru or toll booth).
You can’t illuminate the screen; check the time; check notifications; unlock a phone; make, receive or reject a call; send, receive or upload voice or written content. You can’t use Google Maps unless your phone is in a cradle. You can’t use the phone while in stationary traffic in an electric car, even though the engine automatically turns off; nor when you are supervising a learner driver.
The penalties have also got progressively stricter since 2003 when the fine was just £30. Now you will be fined a £200 fixed penalty and get six points on your licence, disqualifying you if you passed your test within two years.
‘But we still don’t have enough enforcement,’ says Rod Dennis, road safety spokesman for the RAC: ‘We have to be realistic. There aren’t enough police officers. And it is a cultural issue. It is so ingrained in us that we need our phones. We need mobile phone use in cars to be considered as unacceptable as drink driving. AI detection technology will be the way forward.’
In other words, people need to know they will be caught. But as Stephen Barrett of Direct Line said on the publication of the 2019 survey, ‘Until we begin to reduce the reliance on our mobiles it is difficult to see how drivers would change their behaviour, even through changes in the law.’
Right now, a driver can use hands-free to take a call and, in some high-end cars, a video call. They can take a work conference call, listen to a podcast, and can have a difficult/emotional/angry conversation with somebody not in the car if they choose. All of it is within the law – until you crash, and then it will be seen as a contributory factor.
There has been a growing body of scientific evidence pointing to the dangers of hands-free. Gemma Briggs, professor of applied cognitive psychology at the Open University, and Shaun Helman, chief scientist for behavioural sciences at the Transport Research Laboratory, have been leading the campaign to encourage the Government to ban hands-free use in vehicles: ‘Mobile phone law isn’t thorough enough,’ says Professor Briggs. ‘It categorically ignores 30 years of research that shows that hands-free is equally as dangerous in terms of distraction. The human brain cannot have separate channels of processing. If you are doing two things at once, you are switching between two tasks. Research has shown that a driver using a hands-free phone is four times more likely to be involved in a collision than an undistracted driver.
‘Distracted drivers are also far less likely to notice hazards meaning they fail [or are slow] to react to them. This means they can have both eyes on the road and both hands on the steering wheel, but if their mind is on a phone conversation their driving can be significantly impaired. And yet hands-free is still billed as the “safe” alternative to handheld use. The idea that we have “spare” attention when driving is a fallacy.’
In 2019, both Briggs and Helman gave evidence to the Transport Select Committee consultation that led to the law being tightened up in 2022. But the committee’s recommendation was also that the Government ‘should consider the evidence of the risks involved [with hands-free], the consequences of a ban, and the practicalities of enforcing it.’
Shaun Helman says: ‘It comes down to this: you can’t do more than one thing at once without being worse at it.
‘There is always the same response from people, which is, “Surely it’s just like talking to a passenger in the car?”
‘But looking at the data, what you find is that talking to a passenger is radically different. The passenger has an awareness of how you are driving. The passenger doesn’t pester you if you go quiet, saying “Are you still there?”’
In other words, the passenger can respond to changing events affecting the car in a way somebody at the end of the phone can’t. Professor Briggs is clear: ‘A passenger is in a shared environment with the driver and can regulate their conversation.’
And in reverse, when drivers are talking on a hands-free, according to Dr Graham Hole, who worked on a 2016 Sussex University psychology paper with Professor Briggs, ‘conversations are more visual than we might expect, leading drivers to ignore parts of the outside world in favour of their inner “visual world”. Our brains move away from the road to visualise the person or the topic of the call.’
Professor Briggs explains: ‘On paper, the issue of mobile phone use could appear to be solved by camera enforcement, but in practice we won’t see any decrease in the number of deaths or serious injuries because driver distraction will still be present. It will just be legal.’
Right at the heart of the Transport Select Committee’s 2019 recommendations lies a question about our society: until driverless cars are widespread, how ready and willing are we to reduce our reliance on the mobile phone? And if we aren’t ready, what will be the consequences?
Almost a year ago, I was introduced by a friend to a woman I’ll call Sarah. Sarah had recently been released from a four-month stint in prison, having been sentenced to 16 months for dangerous driving with a two-year ban.
Sarah had been in her car on her phone, on a hands-free call, connected to the car’s audio by Bluetooth. Her hands were on the wheel, but she was speeding – 18mph over the 40mph limit – and she went through a traffic light 14 seconds after it changed to red, ‘seeing’ instead the green traffic lights ahead at the next junction. She had been discussing a difficult work issue with a colleague. It was a dark winter night.
She hit a car, and a child who was a passenger was later placed in an induced coma. The child is now making a very good recovery.
Sarah’s story seemed to justify every bit of evidence in favour of a hands-free ban. She kept a diary every day in prison and was writing a book, determined to tell her story to deter others. As Kate Goldsmith had said to me, ‘People need to know of cases where it’s gone wrong for the driver too. Statistics go over people’s heads.’
Sarah’s emotions vary as we talk. Sometimes she cries, other times she is calm. When she talks about her time in prison, there is a glimmer of black humour. The food was so terrible she lost three stone: ‘I’ve put it all back on now.’ She is immensely likeable, articulate and humble and there is no hint of self-justification or special pleading. The child’s recovery was all she had cared about, as well as her own children’s well-being while they had lost their mother to a custodial sentence. The child’s mother had not wanted Sarah to go to prison.
‘I had a mini breakdown afterwards. Nightmares, flashbacks, the sound of the child crying, the blue lights. When I was driven to prison, I was suicidal. They put me on suicide watch.
‘There is no punishment that could have ever been as bad as me having to live with what happened. I’ve made a conscious choice that I am never going to drive a car again. I don’t want my kids to drive. Honestly, that accident has changed my life for ever. I’d never had so much as a detention in school. And it was a family joke that normally I drove so slowly.’
Sarah had been out to dinner with her husband, but they were in separate cars having met straight from work. She’d had half a glass of wine, negligible on the Breathalyser. ‘It was my fault. I went through that red light. But I bet if I hadn’t been on that call I wouldn’t have done it.
‘When I had the crash, I thought the other car had hit me. I had no idea I’d made an error. The police, many months later, showed me the CCTV footage over and over. They said, “the light had been red for 14 seconds”, and I said, “Doesn’t that prove I didn’t see it?” She had been completely distracted by the call and lost track of her speed. She was charged months after the accident, and five days before her father died. She pleaded guilty. Sarah had been prepared by her legal team for community service; but in sentencing, the judge said ‘Immediate custody. Take her down’.
Sarah remembers thinking ‘This is like a film. This can’t be happening.’ Her husband was distraught in the gallery. She hadn’t kissed her children goodbye at breakfast. She was loaded into a prison van, with grills and bench seating. She was led to her cell on the induction wing. Around her, drug addicts and alcoholics were detoxing, screaming and banging their bins against the metal doors. It lasted all day and all night. Only later, she made friends with four women, also there for driving offences. They are still her friends now.
‘And you have all this time to think. I would think about my kids, my husband, my mum, my sister. It puts everything into perspective.’
‘Many people, friends, family, colleagues, messaged me to say, “I’ve done that.” “You were unlucky.” And, “I’m turning my phone off from now on.” The one phrase I heard over and over again was, “There but for the grace of God go I.”
‘I had taken and made hands-free calls in my car every single day. Going to work, coming home from work. I could only cope with the amount of things I was involved in if I used my time in the car.’
On Sarah’s release (on licence, coincidently in the same month as the tightened handheld ban came into force), with the help of her probation officer, she contacted the DVLA to ask for the Highway Code to be amended to make learner drivers aware of the dangerous driving prison sentences. ‘But they weren’t interested. The response was “drivers should already know that”.
‘But I didn’t know,’ she says. ‘I didn’t know! I got no driving re-education while I was inside nor when I came out. Sending somebody to prison serves as a stark warning to everybody else but what about rehabilitation of that offender? I really want to help with that.’
It’s been 18 months since her release: ‘And I am nowhere near the person I once was. I’m highly sensitised. I’m emotional. I feel paranoid. I can’t cope with crowds. But I had to make some sense of what happened. I kept thinking, “There is a reason why this has happened to me.” I had to find that reason. I still have so much guilt and shame.
‘And then I did make sense of “why?” It is to help other people understand that there are consequences to how you drive your car. It is a weapon. And I never want someone else to lose a child, or to injure a child like I did.’
Aimee Goldsmith’s bedroom is the same as it was when she died, although Kate has plans to update it for the late teen Aimee would be now. Her ashes are ‘tucked up under the covers’ in her bed, Kate says. Every night, she activates the glow-in-the-dark stars on Aimee’s ceiling by turning on the light and then turning it off. When she is away for work, she gets somebody else to do it. She talks to Aimee all the time: ‘She is very much part of our lives.’ There are pictures of Aimee everywhere.
Jake is finally doing well. It’s been a long, hard climb and yet he is excelling at university, helped by years of counselling with the charity CHUMS. He still finds it difficult to talk about the accident, but he can see a future.
Kate never uses hands-free now. ‘Until Aimee died, I’d be taking work calls while I was driving home. It’s like you’re running 100 miles an hour. The jobs we do now are so intense that even when you jump in a car, you’re still working. I’d take meetings on the way to pick up the kids. It’s a modern dilemma, fitting everything in, and the phone is the tool that helps you do it.
‘I campaigned for years to highlight the dangers of mobile phone use. I even went out with road traffic officers, telling my story to the drivers they stopped. I thought, “If I can just save one person, then that’s good enough.”
‘But it’s not good enough. Surely we can do better than that?’
