'Trying to kill himself' - young driver who tore through Spennymoor at 90mph

Matthew Dale’s legal team claimed he was trying to kill himself as he raced through Spennymoor, County Durham shortly before noon on Tuesday, June 9.

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But Judge Christopher Prince, sentencing the 20-year-old at Durham Crown Court, said he was simply showing off and compared his driving to a computer game.

Matthew Dale posted this picture to his Facebook account

Sentencing Dale to three years in a Young Offenders’ Institution, the judge told him his driving was “about as bad as it gets” and it was “virtually inevitable” someone would be killed or seriously injured.

As it was, 59-year-old Dawn Horniman suffered a major head injury and spent nearly two weeks in intensive care. Every rib down her right side was broken, along with both of her wrists. Judge Prince said short of being killed or paralysed, her injuries could hardly have been worse.

The wife and mother has no memory of what happened and is still too distressed to talk about her injuries.

But in a statement read to the court, her husband, Mark, said he feared he would lose her and doesn’t know what the future holds.

“The thought of losing her was horrendous. I would not wish this on my worst enemy,” he said.

Mr Horniman had parked his red Citroen C3 outside The Grand Electric Hall Wetherspoons pub on Cheapside to use a nearby cash point when Dale’s bright yellow, turbocharged Vauxhall Corsa, totally out of control, came careering towards it, with Mrs Horniman still in the front passenger seat.

The scene of the crash in Cheapside, Spennymoor

The crash forced the Citroen up a kerb and 17m along the pavement through the Wetherspoons’ outdoor seating area, forcing a man enjoying a quiet drink to jump for his life. Fortunately, no pedestrians were injured and the car finally came to a rest after hitting a metal signpost.

Mrs Horniman was airlifted to hospital and placed into an induced coma. It would be a month before she would return home and the court heard she faced a “long road to recovery”.

Dale, meanwhile, quickly slipped 2.56g of cannabis he had on him to a friend, although he later admitted possessing the Class B drug.

When interviewed by the police, he denied driving the car – claiming to be a back seat passenger.

The fateful episode had begun 1.6 miles away at Dale’s home and prosecutor Paul Currer told the court how he narrowly avoided crashing into a minibus full of pupils from a school for children with autism at a junction.

Data from the Corsa’s black box revealed he had been driving at speeds of up to 90mph in a 40mph limit and up to 67mph in a 30mph limit before the smash.

After clipping a roundabout, he ignored a “no entry” sign into a buses-only zone, where he lost control, spun across the road and hit the Hornimans’ car.

Cathy McCulloch, for Dale, who admitted causing serious injury by dangerous driving, said the 20-year-old, of Binchester Moor, Spennymoor, believed he had testicular cancer and was trying to kill himself.

He decided to smash into the roundabout, but changed his mind at the last minute because it housed a war memorial and he did not want to seem disrespectful, she said.

He has a problem with cannabis and had taken eight Diazepam tablets the night before, Miss McCulloch added, but felt awful for the injuries caused to Mrs Horniman and wanted to apologise face to face and “sort himself out”.

But Judge Prince said he had driven at “phenomenal” speeds and concluded: “The public have to be protected from young persons like you who think that they will show off by tearing round town centres in their bright cars to attraction attention from other people and show off.”

Afterwards, Inspector Lee Morris, from the Cleveland and Durham Specialist Operations Unit, said: “The family are happy with the sentence. They are satisfied that justice has been done and they want to move on as best they can.”