A TEENAGE boat mechanic died after his car hit a wall in St Peter’s Valley, which one eye witness described as ‘essentially a ramp’, an inquest has heard.
Aaron Banks, who had been due to become the Jersey Lifeboat Association’s youngest crew member, was involved in the fatal crash on 2 March 2019 between Tesson Mill and the Mont Felard junction.
The apprentice marine mechanic’s red Suzuki Jimny struck a low granite wall next to the northbound lane and flipped on to its side before sliding along the road and colliding with a blue Ford Focus, according to a States police report read out at the inquest yesterday.
Mr Banks, who lived in St Saviour and attended Le Rocquier School, was pronounced dead at the scene. The driver and two passengers in the other car were uninjured.
Several members of the public tried to come to the aid of Mr Banks following the crash, which took place at 4.20pm, with the emergency services arriving soon after.
Mr Banks suffered an ‘extensive’ head injury in the incident, according to forensic pathologist doctor Russell Delaney.
‘This head injury would have resulted in instant unconsciousness. He would have been unaware of what had happened,’ said Dr Delaney.
No drugs or alcohol were found in either Mr Banks’s or the other driver’s system, Dr Delaney added.
One eyewitness statement from an Islander said that he travelled on the road ‘almost every day’ and knew that the wall had been damaged previously and that a section of it had become ‘essentially a ramp’.
The inquest also heard that there had been a previous accident involving the wall in November 2018.
Despite some eyewitness statements suggesting that Mr Banks was travelling ‘at speed’, collision investigator Detective Constable Donna Hewlett said: ‘I do not think Mr Banks was travelling at an excessive speed.’
She added: ‘It is easy to look at a collision and make the assumption that it was high speed, but I haven’t found that.’
There was no evidence that either car was travelling at an excessive speed, she said. There was also no evidence to suggest what caused Mr Banks’s Suzuki to depart from the carriageway and collide with the granite wall, she added.
Both cars were found to have been in a roadworthy condition at the time of the crash, said DC Hewlett, following inspections by DVS officers after the crash.
Driving conditions were good, and while the road had ‘numerous bends’, it ‘remained unchallenging’, according to DC Hewlett.
Following his death, Mr Banks was described as a ‘lovely kid’ who was always smiling by Andy Hibbs, the coxswain of the Jersey Lifeboat Association, and two of the witness statements read out yesterday spoke about how they had seen him smiling while driving that afternoon.
Deputy Viscount Mark Harris said there had been ‘significant delays’ to the inquest proceedings, due in part to the impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic, witness availability and additional investigations by the police and changes in legal representation for Mr Banks’s family, who were represented by Advocate David Steenson at yesterday’s inquest.
The family raised concerns over the potential involvement in the crash of a yellow UK-registered car being driven by one witness, resulting in a third police report, but DC Hewlett said her investigation found no ‘physical evidence’ that Mr Banks’s vehicle interacted with anyone else’s before the crash. Advocate Steenson raised concerns that this was not pursued further by the police at the time.
The inquest was due to resume today.
