In the second of a two-part series, Phil Pennington looks at the plight of two families battling the system to come to the truth about a double-fatal truck collision.
Two West Otago families were subjected to one of the country's longest and most fraught fatal crash investigations after a truck collision killed two people. Phil Pennington looks at what went wrong.
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In May 2021, Shona Brenssell and Dale Waitokia got word that Brenssell’s husband’s name had been cleared, and he was not responsible for causing the crash as police initially indicated, when Coroner Peter Ryan found it was unfair to say Wayne had contributed to the accident. The first coroner s report concluded that Wayne’s erratic driving – and more specifically, a braking manoeuvre – caused the crash. The pair had been employed by Calder Developments. Instead, Coroner Ryan put the crash down to four factors: a loss of structural integrity in the A-frame, which caused the concrete panels to shift, along with bumps in the road, the load s high centre of mass, and one braking move, possibly when the trailer shifted.
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