County Durham (England) – Truck driver Ion Onut, 41, has claimed the lives of three people after using his cell phone while driving on sex sites. Now the Briton has apologized in tears.
The accident on the A1 in England happened last summer and is part of the current BBC documentary “ Deadly Browsing. For this, the makers visited Onut in prison – the truck driver was sentenced to eight years and ten months in prison in January.
Der Horror-Crash
Onut spent 40 minutes surfing sex websites looking for casual partners while driving the A1 in North East England. He had 93 km/h on the speedometer, 80 km/h were allowed. Onut didn’t realize that there was a traffic jam in front of him. The truck driver crashed into stationary traffic, killing three people. Two others, including a pregnant woman, were seriously injured in the horror crash.
Video recordings show a huge fireball and the truck, which only came to a standstill after 100 meters at the central barrier. As he was pulled out of the cab, Onut was heard saying that he “didn’t have a chance to stop.”
Judge James Adkin said at the verdict: “You did not sleep at the wheel, but scoured the Internet on dating sites in search of occasional sex partners.” Before the accident, he was noticed as an “unpredictable driver”. The judge: “They just crashed into the traffic at 93 km/h.”
The apology
In the BBC documentary, truck driver Onut says it was a “really bad decision” to have been on the phone. “There’s a million things I could say to people. I would like to apologize. I want to say that I’m really sorry because I feel really bad about what happened.”
And further: “I feel bad for the people who have lost loved ones, for the injured who will suffer flashbacks and injuries for the rest of their lives. It’s really hard to accept, and it’s not easy to live with those thoughts for the rest of your life either.”
A relative of the victims also has his say in the documentation. Junior Sullivan lost his mother and stepfather in the accident. He hopes Onut’s apology will have an impact on other drivers as well.
Sullivan: “If people see that and think, ‘I don’t want to be that person, I don’t want to be in prison, I don’t want to have three people killed, I don’t want to have this on my conscience, look at what it’s about did this guy,’ hopefully they’ll take some of it with them.” (bw)