Blog 

"Two-tier justice" and then for some, there's no justice

2 April 2025

Coming up to four years  since Simon's premature death, I still miss him every day. He should still be here, telling bad jokes, riding his bike, enjoying his daughter's wedding and being a much loved husband, father,  friend and colleague.

But he's not, because of the actions of one driver, who in my view, decided to make an ill-judged overtake, forcing Simon to swerve to avoid getting hit and crashing into a tree.

The police pretended to do an investigation, when in fact they made sure that nobody would be held accountable by not securing evidence and not question anything that the driver and his partner told them, in spite of other evidence raising serious questions about their version of events.

In spite of the family asking the police to investigate a close pass overtake from day one, the police did not tell the family that the overtaking car was missing its passenger side wing mirror glass - it was on the floor of the passenger footwell by the time the police got round to examining the car.

The police didn't take the car away for closer examination, and there is no evidence that they actually examined the near side for contact marks – the car had been parked close to bushes making it difficult to access the passenger side. There are photos of the other three sides of the vehicle, as well as the wing mirror casing, but none of the actual side.

The police told the family that there was no dashcam footage of the incident, when in fact there were two oncoming vehicles around the time of the crash that both had dash cams. According to the family's independent collision investigator, it is very possible that one of these cars were the reason why David Pratt pulled back into lane before having fully passed Simon.

In spite of an independent witness contradicting the account of the driver and his partner, and the driver and his partner contradicting each other, the police never corroborated or challenged any of the driver and his partner's claims.

In late October 2021, we received the police report and that was the first time we found out about the missing wing mirror glass. At that point, although we were stunned to discover this critical fact, we were still naive enough to believe that surely the police must have investigated and eliminated this smoking gun, even if the report was shoddy and riddled with errors: For example, the report estimated the time of the crash to be 12 minutes after the emergency call was made.

When the family objected to the findings of the report, we were told by the police that we could bring it up at the coroner's inquest. This was nonsense, because at a coroner's inquest, you are not allowed to challenge witnesses, because it's a "fact finding" exercise as opposed to apportioning blame.

To be continued