The driver of a car that fatally mowed down two girls at a school in London last year will not face prosecution, prosecutors said on Wednesday. On the morning of July 6, a Land Rover hit several people in the garden of a girls’ school just before the summer holidays in a residential area of Wimbledon.
An 8-year-old child died the same day, another, of the same age, succumbed to her injuries three days later.
But the investigation showed that the motorist was not responsible. “The driver of the vehicle had an epileptic seizure while driving, which caused her to lose control of the vehicle,” Jaswant Narwal of the British Public Prosecutor’s Office said in a statement.
“No evidence indicates that the driver had ever experienced such a crisis before” and until then no health problem had been diagnosed in her, she added.
To the extent that “there is nothing to suggest that the driver could have done anything to predict or prevent this tragedy, it is not in the public interest to give rise to criminal proceedings,” said the head of the department. Prosecutor’s office, the investigation having concluded that this crisis had been the first to strike the driver, aged around forty.
In a statement, the families of the two children stressed that they were “not convinced that the investigation was carried out thoroughly” and believed that justice had not been done. “Nuria and Selena deserved better,” they said.
For her part, the driver expressed her “deepest sorrow” for the victims’ families and assured that she had “no memory of what happened” after losing consciousness that day.
Following the diagnosis, she voluntarily gave up her driving license and will have to wait a year without seizures before she can request it back.
