Drug driver who mowed down best-selling author's step-daughter and three dogs in high-speed crash jailed
28 July 2023, 15:40 | Updated: 28 July 2023, 15:57
A drug-driver who mowed down and killed a woman and her three dogs as he sped through central London in his sportscar has been jailed.
Laszlo Dancs, 28, lost control of his Audi TT as he drove along the Chelsea Embankment at more than three times the 20mph speed limit, smashing through a central reservation where 41-year-old Olivia Riley and the dogs were standing.
Ms Riley, from North Elmham near Dereham, the stepdaughter of best-selling author Lucinda Riley was out for a Saturday morning walk with her family’s two labradors called Lily and Maia and a golden retriever puppy called Darcy who also died from their injuries.
The Old Bailey heard Dancs, from Ealing, west London, had been drinking and taking cocaine while out celebrating his 27th birthday. Vodka bottles and a bag of cocaine under the driver’s seat were recovered from the wrecked Audi.
Dancs, a pizza restaurant worker, was accused of attempting to shift the blame for the crash on to another driver, the court heard, and tests revealed he was over the drink drive limit and had cocaine in his system.
Sentencing Dancs to six years and eight months in prison, Judge Simon Medland KC said it was a “tragic, appalling, needless, and avoidable” death.
He added: “It’s a tragic example of how motor vehicles we all rely on can become lethal weapons if driven dangerously and at speed as you did, while highly impaired by alcohol and cocaine."
Ms Riley’s father Stephen said, in a statement read to the court by his brother Mark, that his first wife died when his daughter was born, and he lost his second wife to cancer in 2021.
He said Ms Riley had taken on a maternal role for her younger stepbrother and stepsister when they lost their mother, and they have both been left “devastated” by her death.
“Olivia was a remarkably loving and generous person and cared for everyone she knew,” the statement added.
“The accused has left Leonora and Kit with not only no mother but the person who was guiding them with so much love and care throughout. They are devastated and suffering terribly as a result.
“I have lost someone who was the brightest light in my life for 41 years and who I will miss and mourn so deeply throughout my final years”, he said.
Dancs pleaded guilty to causing death by dangerous driving, driving while on drugs, and driving with excess alcohol in his system.
Jeremy Dein KC, defending, said Dancs had experienced a break-up of a long-term relationship before the incident and had gone to a nightclub to celebrate his birthday before the crash without the intention of drinking alcohol, and he initially intended to get a taxi home.
Dancs, who moved to the UK from Hungary in 2014, had no previous convictions and wrote a letter to the judge expressing his “overwhelming sense of guilt”, said Mr Dein.
The judge imposed driving ban of five years and four months on Dancs, and he must pass an extended driving test before he can return to the roads.
Leonora Riley wrote a poem following Ms Riley's death:
Olivia by Leonora Riley
A light that always shone so brightly, shall not be dimmed.
Darkness yields no control over her tenderness, engulfing her loved ones with boundless elation
A strength that survived cruelty and resentment shall not be weakened.
Her scars turn to shards of blinding light, illuminating the world on her shoulders
A joy that raised spirits in all that met her, will be forever cherished, radiating through cloaks of aversion, attempting to break her impenetrable spirit
A grace that has mesmerised many, shall not be washed away, surviving even the roughest of seas, bubbling into flickers of luminescence on the shores of Suffolk.
A deep, unconditional love that has changed us eternally, shall never see an end, blessing us from the confines of precious memory, Olivia’s radiance unbroken by the setting of the sun.
