Mum weeps as she is jailed for killing her two children in drink-drive motorway crash
25 April 2022, 13:21 | Updated: 25 April 2022, 18:50
A mother of four wept as she was sentenced to four years in jail for killing two of her children in a drink-drive motorway crash.
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Mary McCann, 35, has been jailed for two counts of causing death by careless driving under the influence of alcohol, appearing at Aylesbury Crown Court via video link on Monday.
She killed her son Smaller, who turned 10 that day, and four-year-old daughter Lilly, after her Vauxhall Astra crashed into a Scania HGV on the M1 near Milton Keynes on August 9 last year.
She was driving between junctions 14 and 15 when she drifted from lane two into lane one and caused the collision, the court heard.
A third passenger, a two-year-old girl, was not seriously injured and the driver of the lorry, Simon Denton, was left with whiplash.
After being charged, McCann went on the run for nearly a week. Prosecutors said she had failed to contact her solicitors after the funeral of her two children.
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She was arrested last September after failing to answer bail.
Stephen Shay, prosecuting, said: "Ms McCann was driving three children in a Vauxhall Astra car when at 11.12pm she collided with the rear of a lorry driven by Simon Denton.
"Tragically, two of her children were killed."
Mr Shay told the court McCann was driving at 72mph in a 60 zone, with Lilly and Smaller not wearing their seatbelts.
Lilly was thrown from the car and found on the roadside, while Smaller was flung around the backseat and found slumped in the footwell,
A witness heard McCann shout: "God, why didn't I put their seatbelts on?" in the smash's immediate aftermath, Mr Shay said.
Laban Leake, defending, said: "She is here to be punished by this court and rightly so, but it must be acknowledged that the true punishment for this offence lives within Mary McCann.
"It is to that unquenchable wheel of fire that Mary McCann is bound."
He said his client has complex post-traumatic stress disorder.
Judge Francis Sheridan said Lilly would "not have been ejected" if she had been strapped in, while "Smaller would have remained in his seat".
He said: "There is no punishment commensurate with the loss of one's two children and I accept that.
"The message must go out: don't drive under the influence of alcohol."
He said Mr Denton did nothing wrong.
McCann, of Bamford Avenue, Derby, was handed a sentence of four years and one month, and has been disqualified from driving for seven years and two weeks.
