Drink-driving teenager admits to killing friend (From Tewkesbury Admag)

Drink-driving teenager admits to killing friend

A SOUTH Warwickshire teenage girl was almost twice the legal alcohol limit when she crashed into a tree late at night, killing a friend who was sitting next to her, a court was told on Monday.

Helen Atkinson pleaded guilty at Warwick Crown Court to causing the death of her friend Kelly Marsh by careless driving while over the legal alcohol limit.

The charge revealed that at the time of the crash in November last year Atkinson, aged 19, of Westmede Cottages, Butlers Marston, near Kineton, had an alcohol reading of 68 compared to the legal limit of 35.

Her barrister Louis French said Atkinson was of previous good character, and asked for a pre-sentence report to be prepared on her.

Judge James Pyke responded: "It would be wrong for the defendant to be under any misapprehensions as to the type of sentence she faces, but having regard to her age it is right that the court should have all the information it can."

Adjourning the case for the report to be prepared, the Judge granted Atkinson bail, but imposed an interim driving ban, the final length of which will be decided when she is sentenced.

And Judge Pyke warned her: "You must understand that the sentence may be of a kind which will be inevitable in such a case."

During an earlier preliminary hearing prosecutor Neil Bannister explained that the charge follows Kelly's death in a late-night crash on the Lighthorne Road near Kineton on November 13 last year.

Kelly, a 20-year-old dental nurse from nearby Temple Herdewyke, was the front seat passenger in Atkinson's Peugeot 206 after an evening out.

The car left the road shortly after midnight and crashed into a tree.

Kelly, a former pupil at Kineton High School and Warwickshire College who worked at Langmans and Associates dental surgery in Wellesbourne, died at the scene.

A young man who was in the back of the car suffered injuries to his head and limbs and had to be freed by firefighters, while Atkinson had cuts to her knee.

At that hearing it was said that Atkinson accepted 'the vast majority of the facts,' but that the defence wanted an expert to consider the evidence before the charge was put to her because there was a question over whether she was actually driving without due care and consideration at the time.