TNT driver slammed
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• The inquest jury that returned a ten-to-one verdict of unlawful killing for the death of a teenager crushed under the wheels of a TNT lorry leaving Wapping in January (CM 28 April), defied the dirction of St Pancras Coroner, Dr Douglas Chambers.
Relatives of 19-year-old Michael Delaney, an unemployed labourer of Highbury Gardens, Ilford, wept in the public gallery as the jury announced the verdict after being out for nearly two hours.
Summing up the four-day inquest, Chambers told the jury that "appropriate" verdicts would be misadventure or accidental death. He warned them that a verdict of unlawful killing would equate with reckless driving causing death, which would mean that TNT driver Robert Higgins would have shown "total disregard for the consequences of the act".
After the inquest Roy Mincoff, solicitor for the Delaney family, said that the verdict showed the jury did not accept Higgin's evidence that Delaney chased his lorry and slipped on ice at the junction of Butcher Row and Commercial Road, Stepney on 10 January.
"The jury had heard other evidence that the lorry had turned left and the driver and co-driver knew that Michael Delaney was by the side of the cab and that there was a real possibility that he would be trapped if the lorry continued to turn left," he said, adding that the co-driver, Michael Worley, had in his own evidence not been concerned about whether Michael reached the safety of the footpath after slapping the side of the lorry.
Mincoff announced that the Delaney family would be taking civil action against TNT and its driver and that the verdict was an indictment on the way in which TNT drivers drove their lorries during the bitter industrial dispute. "I trust the police will now prosecute the TNT driver," he said.
During the inquest the court heard that Delaney had been walking home from a night's drinking with three friends and had shouted "scab" at the lorry at the junction as they were crossing the road in front of it. Delaney's friends said he had walked down the side of the lorry as it began to move off and banged on the passenger door before being crushed under the wheels. He died early the next morning at the London Hospital.
The lorry continued it's journey, the driver apparently unaware of the accident. It was stopped by police at Heston services on the M4. None of the four teenagers had been involved in the Wapping dispute, but their path home that night had taken them past the departing lorries.
Chief Inspector J Pickard said during the inquest that police would wait until the verdict was announced before deciding whether to prosecute the driver of the lorry.