Personal injury news

Family of road traffic accident victim make plea to other drivers

The heartbroken parents of an East Yorkshire teenager who died in a road traffic accident have appealed to other motorists to ensure they wear their seatbelts.

Their plea came after an inquest into the death of their son, Richard Marshall, revealed that the 18-year-old had not been wearing his belt when his car when his car ran careered off the road and into a field near Middleton-on-the-Wolds in January this year. Dicky, as he was known to his friends and family, suffered massive head injuries in the car crash and died instantly.

Speaking on behalf of Dicky's parents, local policeman Sgt Martin Moore said, "The family can never put into words the loss of this young life, and it is made all the more difficult by the circumstances of this loss.

"The fact that Dicky was not wearing a seatbelt is looking to have been a major contributing factor to his death. He would have had a very realistic chance of survival if he had been wearing it.

"The message here is that if you don't wear your seatbelt you may just subject your family to what the Marshalls have been through.

"He was a good, decent lad and it is your good, honest, hard-working folk that are the victims of his loss."

Police investigations failed to discover the reason for the road traffic accident, but it is thought that a text message received by Dicky at about the same time as the tragedy occurred could have distracted him.