The family of a talented young footballer, who was tragically killed in a car accident, are backing a road safety campaign, urging young drivers to focus while on the roads.
In February 2014, Chelsea fan, Jordan Dowson, was killed, when the car, in which he was a back seat passenger in, was involved in a collision on the A174 Brotton by-pass. The car was being driven by his friend who inexplicably was on the wrong side of the road at the time of the collision. His friend has since been sentenced to three and a half years in prison for causing death by dangerous driving.
What is Road Safety GB
The Road Safety GB North East campaign is designed at educating young people to focus more on the roads. Latest statistics reveal that young drivers are four times more likely to be involved in a crash than other driver. They also showed that the risk becomes greater when they are travelling with friends.
From 2011 to 2015, close to a third of road traffic accident injuries in the North East region involved young drivers. What makes this more shocking is the fact that drivers aged 17 to 24 only makes up 7% of driving licence holders in the region. In this time 38 young drivers have been killed and 440 injured, a statistic that the campaign is desperate to cut in coming years.
Following the death of Jordan, his grieving family are supporting the campaign, which sees representatives, which include the police fire service, travelling to colleges to talk to the students about the dangers. They hope that their story will help to avoid other families enduring the pain they are going through.
Speaking to ITV, Jordan’s mum, Tanya, said:
“Every day is still very painful for us because Jordan should not have died that day. He was such a fun, happy character – he had his whole life ahead of him.
We will never really know what happened. All we do know is there was no fault with the car and for some reason Josh was in the wrong lane, which caused the collision that ended Jordan’s life and changed ours forever.
The pain never goes away but we must learn to live with it. Talking about it is difficult but we hope that by supporting the campaign we can show young people how road accidents can ruin and take lives.
If it helps save one life, it will have been worth it.”
Scott Rees & Co partner, David Byrne, praised the scheme and Tanya’s courage in actively supporting it. He said:
“The statistics across the UK for young drivers involved in accidents are shockingly high, so campaign such as Road Safety GB are vitally important. The loss of any life, as the result of a road collision is hard to deal with but there is something more tragic about it when it is the loss of someone so young.
People like Tanya deserve great credit for their courage for coming forward while they are still grieving themselves, to try and help others. Hopefully, her story will hit home with other youngsters and bring an end to the senseless deaths of the young on UK roads.”