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Note: This article contains video footage some may find upsetting
A 30-YEAR-OLD lorry driver has been sentenced to 10 years imprisonment for killing four members of the same family in a road accident after becoming distracted by the music on his phone.
Tomasz Kroker, of Andover, Hampshire, had pleaded guilty to four counts of causing death by dangerous driving earlier this month.
Kroker had been driving a lorry and was changing the music on his phone when he smashed into a stationary line of traffic on the A34 road near Newbury in Berkshire, England, at about 5pm on the 10 August.
He had been distracted from the road for nearly a minute and had covered one kilometre in his vehicle, as evidenced by the two dashcams in the truck – one facing the road and the other facing Kroker.
Speaking outside court, Aimee Goldsmith’s mother Kate made a highly emotional statement about the loss her family has suffered:
“Today Tomasz Kroker has been sentenced for killing much-loved members of our family,” she said.
However, in our eyes the sentence does not do justice to the crimes committed.
Mr Kroker made the decision to change the music on his phone while driving a lorry at 50 mph.
A sentence of 10 years in prison will not ease our pain and suffering, nor will it send a strong enough message to those who lack the self-restraint to not use their mobile phones while driving.
Today’s outcome must serve as a reminder to us all of our responsibilities every time we drive, and that the decisions we make can be fatal. Our children lost their lives because of the reckless actions of Tomasz Kroker, but we are not the only family to have suffered due to what is perceived by many as a minor and inconsequential crime, a crime that takes place on our roads every day.
We urge you to make a personal commitment not to use a mobile phone while driving, and make our roads safer for everyone.
Collision
45-year-old Tracy Houghton, her two sons Josh (11) and Ethan (13), and her step-daughter Aimee Goldsmith (11) all died almost instantly in the impact.
Five further people were injured in the collision, while Aimee’s father and brother were in the car directly behind that in which their family members died.
When the truck hit them the car driven by Tracy Houghton was forced beneath a stationary lorry and crushed to one third of its normal size.
Footage shown in court today showed Kroker’s look of horror just before the impact between his lorry and the stationary vehicles.
“This was not just a tragic accident, but a death caused by Kroker’s inattention and distraction,” said Gavin Hernandez, district crown prosecutor for Thames and Chiltern Crown Prosecution Service.
The slow-moving vehicles were clearly visible to Kroker for a considerable time, and the three lorries were stationary for 16 seconds prior to the collision, but Kroker was oblivious to the approaching danger.
Kroker had initially claimed that his brakes had failed, but changed his story when confronted with the dashcam footage from his truck.
“It is unimaginable to think of the emotional impact that this incident will have on the man and teenage boy, who witnessed, at close range, the deaths of four members of their own family,” Hernandez added.
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This is the crowd SF celebrated with…God help is if they ever get into govt here.
@SFNutters: FFG want to see another General Pinochet take over and sell all state assets to the US. Anyone who challenged Pinochet ended up dead. Maggie Thatcher was his best mate. Well done FFG.
@SFNutters: in fairness I think most people realise Venezuelans main problems stem from crippling US policies against them. And the US backing a current illegal coup will only make things worse. Although where there’s oil..
@Toon Army: Did you even read the article? Do you not understand what the Venezuelan family have said in the article? This whole mess is entirely down to the incompetence and corruption of the Chavez/Maduro regime that have brought what was once the richest most prosperous country in South America to a state even Zimbabwe at its worst could just about rival.
@Mick.: Did you see Bolton on Fox news last weekend state publicly that American oil companies are lined up to take over all of Venezualas oil once the country is ‘Liberated’. I don’t think mosr Venezualans were too happy to hear that and refused to take part in the coup attempt 3 days later.
@Cal Mooney: Fox News? Seriously? Get a grip on your life.
@Mick.: Agree with you. People have jumped on this USA bandwagon over the past few months and forgetting the people who are actually suffering.
My partner, his family, his friends, his neighbors still living over there. They call with horror stories very often. Some of the people in here could do with sitting down and chatting with a Venezuelan person to get the real details.
@Cal Mooney: Do fail to understand that it will take oil companies with their expertise to restore the damage done to Venezuela’s oil infrastructure. And it will take years.
@Joey Casey: That’s your response to Bolton saying America is ready to take over Venezualan oil. Does it matter which news network he told that to? I have spoken to many Venezualans and they are against US involvement in their country based on their fellow South American neighbours, Chile’s experience. Did your friend not mention that fear to you?
@Cal Mooney: what’s your opinion on Russian corporations like ROSNEFT acquiring drilling rights to Venezuelan oil fields and brokering oil sales of Venezuelan oil?
How about Chinese banks and mining companies getting exclusive rights to Venezuela’s natural assets as interest payment terms on loans to Venezuela from Chinese banks?
You don’t think the Chavez or Maduro families got ‘favourable’ terms for these transactions?.
You think Russian and Chinese controlled banks and corporations are dealing in Venezuelan assets out of the goodness of their heart for the benefit of the Venezuelan people?
Oil, loans, military: Russia’s exposure to Venezuela
@Diaspora’d: lol, like a lot of people here, if it was an American company, it’s bad. If it’s a Russian or Chinese company, then it’s ok. Likewise, kill a Tibetan or Uighur, no problem. But, kill a Palestinian, and it should be front page news. Selective human rights here.
@Toon Army: can I point out that all coups are illegal. Otherwise they aren’t a coup…that doesn’t mean they aren’t justified though
@Cal Mooney: the minute u mentioned fox news u lost all credibility. Might as well be quoting the enquirer that aliens landed in cork
@Anthony: only if they are not given the ok by the US….they are spreading democracy after all lol
Socialism … how to banish prosperity and liberty!
With this hardship, why would any reasonable country impose sanctions to stop the basics getting into the country. Those same countries including england have destroyed Yemen, Libya, Iraq and Syria. Our FFG leaders say nothing and do nothing. This is Capitalism at its most evil and they are looking to do the same now in Venezuala and Cuba.
@Cal Mooney: nonsense it was a capitalist country when it was prosperous
Socialism Chavez style has deprived them of both prosperity and liberty
@Stephen Murphy: It was only wealthy for the privileged few. It had severe poverty for the lower classes and amongst the lowest literacy rates in the world. That’s utopia for FFG.
@Cal Mooney: The problem in Venezuela occurred because it’s government was totally reliant on oil revenue to carry out its social policies, it worked during the years when the price of oil was high, when it dropped the government couldn’t carry out its social policies and mismanaged its currency and mismanaged its oil infrastructure, the government then became a regime to hang onto power.
If oil was the same high price it was before, then there wouldn’t be any issue
It was all thanks to high priced oil while Chavez was in power. Maduro was anointed successor in 2013….and then the following year, 2014, international oil prices began their plunge, dropping from a peak of US$115 per barrel in June 2014 to US$35 by February 2016. Inflation reached 800%.. there were no ECONOMIC sanctions during Chavez’s tenure, the economic sanctions started in 2017.
This is the US department of Treasury website that outlines all the sanctions on business and trade with Venezuela. It also shows when they were imposed.
2015 there were sanctions on certain ‘individuals’
2017 was when first economic sanctions were imposed
https://www.treasury.gov/resource-center/sanctions/programs/pages/venezuela.aspx
@Cal Mooney: So now you are admitting that it was the Socialist policies under Chavez and Maduro that have brought the country to its knees.
Btw. There has never been any sanctions on Medicine, Food or any general basics. And even until a few months ago there were not even sanctions on Oil sales. For nearly 2 Decades of Oil sales worth hundreds of billions of dollars, where has all the money gone??? We know that Chavez’s daughter is the richest woman in Venezuela. Where did the money come from??? The Chavez/Maduro regime have robbed the country of its wealth.
@Mick.: No Mick, I am not. I remember you commenting before about Assad ready to massacre 300,000 people in Aleppo in Syria and that the US should send an invasion force to protect the people there. Assad retook Aleppo and there was no massacre. Do you want a US military invasion of Venezuala too? Cuba after that or maybe even before it? What about attacking Iran. That has to good for the military industry, right?
@Cal Mooney: Your words “With this hardship, why would any reasonable country impose sanctions”.
Now most reasonable logical people will read that and agree that you are saying the Hardship came “before” the Sanctions not after them. So that being the case, what caused the hardship? Well if it came before the Sanctions, logic dictates it must have come from the economic polices in place for nearly 2 decades.
Ergo you admitted that is the regimes fault.
And realising that you finally admitted to the truth, you are trying to back peddle.
In the article we have heard first hand from a Venezuelan Family. A normal Family that have stated the the decline began with Chavez and accelerated exponentially under Maduro.
But your own political outlook colours your responses to this mess. You are desprate to blame the US and the West, despite all evidence to the contrary up to and including local witnesses to the events over the past 19 years.
@Cal Mooney: The sanctions are not on the people, they are on specific individuals within the regime who have committed crimes. And American aid is at the Columbian border, providing it goes to the citizens and not the regime. America is not the villain here, socialism is.
Yes, if only we could go back to those beautiful days when “rampant corruption and social inequality” were only felt by the poor
@instagram Parsons: The People of Venezuela don’t have to go back in time to those days. They are currently living in them.
I remember going to Venezuela in 1989. I was struck hard by the poverty back then. You would have rows of mansions then around the corner streets upon streets of shacks. Kids begging for food. You either had or you had not. No middle class
Yes it was beautiful when the high GDP was distributed by the 10% of the population while the 90% were in extreme poverty , unemployed and without access to education or health services . Beautiful wasn’t it , to meet all these international investors who sucked the oil profits out of the country . The privileged crying for their lost privilege without a care or a sense of what 90% of the population endured without a word for USA sanctions and coups .
Baz Ashawy can be a little annoying at times
…..There are historical precedents for abortive coups being followed by the real thing later on. Such was the case in Chile in June 1973, when a lieutenant colonel led a column of tanks against the presidential palace, the so called tanquetazo revolt against the Popular Unity government of President Salvador Allende, which was quickly put down. The failed attempt, however, proved a dress rehearsal for the successful coup led by General Augusto Pinochet in September1973. It was used to gauge the reaction of the military, the government and the working class organizations. Pinochet would rule the country with a fascist-military dictatorship for the next 16 years.
A military revolt to overthrow the Maduro government could provoke a bloody civil war in Venezuela. Its success would undoubtedly impose a savage dictatorship, joining sections of the armed forces with the country’s traditional right-wing oligarchy and US imperialism.
Guaidó has already spelled out the economic and social objectives of this regime in his so-called “Plan Pais,” which calls for the privatization of Venezuela’s oil reserves, the largest on the planet, and handing them over to the US-based energy conglomerates, starvation wages and the complete subordination of the country’s economy to the austerity adjustment plans of the IMF. Such policies can be implemented only by means of police-state repression.
The Venezuelan working class can rely neither upon the Maduro government nor the high command of the country’s military to defeat the conspiracies of Washington and its puppet Guaidó. Both have defended the existing capitalist order in Venezuela, and the interests of both the boliburguesia of financial speculators, government officials and contractors, and those of the banks and transnationals, such as Chevron and Halliburton, while workers have seen their living standards decimated.
The only progressive answer to the increasingly dangerous crisis unfolding in Venezuela lies in the independent political intervention of the working class, fighting for the arming of the masses, the seizure of bourgeois property and foreign capitalist holdings and the placing of the country’s vast oil wealth under popular control.
The issue with debating the causes of the problems in Venezuela is, people adopt either failed a socialisim or external corporate and international interference position.
When both arguments can be supported by facts or personal accounts, the reality is that it’s not one or the other, it’s both!
The question should perhaps be, what type of ideological government could manage the national crisis in the face of international sanctions, seizures of funds and assets internationally?
From the global perspective the answer appears to be one that does what it is told…
For decades the economy of Venezuela was structured to benefit the rich minority and the poor struggled, this was globally accepted as the natural order, because wealth from natural resources also flowed to the corporations.
@David Van-Standen: sanity at last. This article annoys me as I have close ties to Cali and have lived there. This family are living well. That looks like an estrato 4 apartment at least ( taxes are levied according to how fancy your neighborhood is . 1 is shantytown , 7 is big money). Go and really talk to the people at the traffic lights. Normally in Cali you have argentinian street performers and the ‘ordinary’ poor Colombians and internally refugees. Go to Agua Blanca or Palmira and talk about Colombia’s problems. The average Caleno earns about 200 dollars a month and breaks their balls for it, many get by on half that. Tell us about all the money Odebrecht and friends have stolen. Teach-up as they say in my profession.
Ireland is like a much milder venezuela but the vital difference is we have the EU system to keep us afloat. Without the EU, we’d be a basket case too. And greece would be much worse too. Our self enriching clueless FFG idiots have tried their best to destroy the country.
@Adrian: Its idiot’s that keep voting for them is the problem…and they will be the first to complain about the state of the country not realising that their votes are causing it….moronic in the extreme.
Why are vodafone adverts always so rubbish?
I am Brazilian and lived in Ireland in 2013. I had many Venezuelan friends there and they were already afraid of their future. They could see their “Bolivarian” government was heading to chaos. Some even actually wanted active reaction from powers such as the USA back then. I just think they didn’t expect it to get that bad after Chavez death.
I’m by no means rightwing, but Maduro is a complete incompetent leader trying to implement socialism in the worst way possible.
Now, I’m back to Brazil and see Venezuelan people fleeing to Brazil and other neighbouring countries, creating a humanitarian problem in these countries as well.
On top of that, we have a US president that actually thinks a military solution is still an option (even though the last option) and a Russian president that would love to go full Syria in the Americas.
I believe this time if it gets to this level of tension, it would be even worse than the USSR in Cuba, because Cuba was a country that could stand on its own (reason why it still exists to this day with minimum regime reforms. Not like NK as they are alive mostly thanks to China nowadays). Venezuela would look a lot more like Syria if Russia really decides protecting Maduro.
I really don’t want a war bordering my country
Here’s an old one, but true, better dead than red
@Jimmy Carroll: better dead??i think if it was your life on the line then you would bypass the death option,practise what you preach Jimmy
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