A 22-year-old driver was jailed for 86 months and lost his driver’s license for 77 months after he killed a walker in the British town of Lincolnshire and fled. The victim’s mother found him in the canal by tracking down his mobile phone.
On April 22 2022, Josh Ashworth (22) was walking home along the A52 after a night out when a BMW hit him is driven by Cole Tressidder, also 22 years old and not in possession of a car at the time, around 9.30 pm. a driver’s license after a conviction for driving under the influence, resulting in an accident.
When Ashworth was not home the following day, his worried mother raised the alarm. A search was launched, and thanks to the tracking app on their iPhones, his mother found him in the roadside canal around 7 am. He lay there face down.
The driver fled after the collision. His car had suffered some damage. Just before that, Tresidder had been seen by another driver, who indicated during the investigation that the man was driving too fast. That was also the conclusion of the police investigation. Tresidder must have been driving 96 kilometres per hour when he hit Ashworth. He only turned himself in around noon on April 23, 2022, according to his own words, after reading the news on social media. He said he did not know he had hit anyone. The twenty-something would have called a garage on the evening of the accident to have his car repaired.
Ashworth’s mother read an emotional statement in court. “Why would anyone leave such a beautiful person by the side of the road? Then I would not have been the one who found my son with horrific injuries.” The young man would have died immediately after the collision from a broken skull. “For days, it haunted me that he might have been lying there suffering for hours. Fortunately, that was not the case.” She described her son as “beautiful, complex and full of love”. “My life as I knew it ended on April 23, 2022.”
The car driver pleaded guilty to driving without a license and insurance and admitted to possessing cocaine and attempting to distribute the drug. The judge saw a mitigating circumstance in that you would not expect a pedestrian to walk along that busy highway but that he should have turned himself in immediately. Instead, Tressider was sentenced to 86 months in prison and lost his driver’s license for 77 months.