Intoxicated Driver Gets Fined $500 for Fatal Crash
An intoxicated epileptic driver who crashed into a man and killed him has walked away with a $500 fine and a five-month driving ban.
Driver Richelle Varney, 42, was found to have had levels of methylamphetamine "within the reported fatal range" in her system when she crashed into Guy Carlsen on Nov. 4, 2009, the Sydney Daily Telegraph reports.
Carlsen was on the street to buy pizza with his fiancée.
The court did not penalize Varney's drug use, acquitting her of dangerous driving occasioning death because she had undiagnosed epilepsy.
District Court Judge Robert Toner ruled Varney probably suffered a seizure shortly before the crash.
Three doctors had told the court the most likely cause of the crash was epilepsy, one saying Varney would not have been able to drive safely. But no doctor had told Varney not to drive.
Toner merely asked Varney to pay a fine of $500 and banned her from driving for five months after she pleaded guilty to driving while drugged.
Carlsen's fiancee, Kathryn Davis, told the Telegraph she could not forgive Varney.
Varney crashed her Holden four-wheel-drive into Carlsen as he and Davis stopped to buy pizza for dinner. Davis said Carlsen tried to push her out of the way before he was hit and died in front of her.
"If this was a normal 42-year-old woman who did not do drugs, that it was purely an accident, and (she) was genuinely remorseful, perhaps I could forgive her," she said.
"But she came up to Guy's mother after the sentence and said, 'It wasn't my fault.' "She was still not even prepared to say so much as sorry."
Varney, a landscape gardener from Alexandria, told the Telegraph she had "done nothing wrong."
"I was having an epileptic fit. The drugs have got nothing to do with it," she said. "I wasn't guilty because I was having a fit. People need to understand that."