A doctor has been spared jail after a court heard how a \u201ccatastrophic\u201d tyre defect triggered a crash that fatally injured his six-year-old daughter on the M6 on her birthday.<\/p>\n
Babak Meshkat (46) of An Cim\u00edn M\u00f3r, <\/b>Cappagh Road, Galway, was charged following a Garda investigation into a crash on the motorway, at Rochfortbridge, in Co Westmeath on February 8th, 2024.<\/p>\n
Hana Meshkat had been unbuckled in the back seat of her father\u2019s BMW X5 for just a minute before the car lost control.<\/p>\n
He had been driving in excess of the speed limit to Dublin Airport to collect her grandparents, who were visiting Hana as a surprise for her birthday. <\/p>\n
Due to severe head injuries, she died nine days after the crash at Children\u2019s Health Ireland (CHI) hospital at Temple Street in Dublin.<\/p>\n
Meshkat pleaded guilty at Mullingar Circuit Criminal Court after the charge of dangerous driving causing death was reduced to a lesser offence of careless driving causing death.<\/p>\n
The father-of-three, who sat silently during the sentence hearing on Friday, was fined \u20ac5,000 and banned from driving for 12 months.<\/p>\n
Judge Cephas Power said: \u201cThere is no sentence of this court that can act as a greater punishment than the daily pain and suffering that Mr Meshkat now endures. <\/p>\n
\u201cThere is no sentence of this court that can act as a greater deterrence against acts of unsafe driving and the horror of the circumstances of this case, now known to have been caused by a combination of factors.\u201d<\/p>\n
He noted a \u201clatent defect\u201d in the BMW which the accused was driving, leading to a catastrophic failure in the rear tyre of the vehicle. The second was the unsecured child who unbuckled her belt 60 seconds before the incident. <\/p>\n
\u201cAnd third, and to a much lesser extent, the speed at which the car was driving,\u201d he said. \u201cAll of those factors led to the death of one so loved by her parents and everyone who knew her.\u201d <\/p>\n
The judge noted that the accused remained grief-stricken.<\/p>\n
The court heard he had post-traumatic stress disorder, constant flashbacks and suicidal ideation.<\/p>\n
He lived about eight kilometres from the hospital where he works and occasionally needed to drive for emergency call-outs, hospital attendance, or to bring family members and children to various activities, the judge also noted.<\/p>\n
The court heard that when he lost control of the vehicle, the airbags deployed, and the vehicle flipped up and down on the embankment before coming to a rest back on the motorway.<\/p>\n
Meshkat became aware a moment before the crash that Hana had undone her seat belt. His speed four seconds before the crash was 173km\/h, and the limit on the motorway is 120km\/h. The average speed of the BMW had been 138km\/h.<\/p>\n
The accused co-operated with the investigation and has no previous convictions, the judge said. The car had been serviced regularly, was only two years old, and the tyres were heavily worn despite being bought just nine months beforehand.<\/p>\n
The judge also noted the evidence that, but for the delamination of the tyre, this case would not be before the court; that this was the primary event and that it was accepted by the Director of Public Prosecutions.<\/p>\n
The judge said there was excessive speed, but the evidence was clear that the car would have gone out of control even at 120km\/h. He added that it was simply not possible to say whether the outcome would have been any different.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A doctor has been spared jail after a court heard how a \u201ccatastrophic\u201d tyre defect triggered a crash…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":602617,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[3],"tags":[19620,9,10,18,13,14,6,19,17,11,12,15,16,1109,5,7,8],"class_list":["post-602616","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-bob","tag-breaking-news","tag-breakingnews","tag-eire","tag-featured-news","tag-featurednews","tag-headlines","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-latest-news","tag-latestnews","tag-main-news","tag-mainnews","tag-media","tag-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topstories"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ie\/116976943565419996","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/602616","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=602616"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/602616\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/602617"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=602616"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=602616"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=602616"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}