A motorist has told an inquest about the moment his car struck a teenager who had been flung from his moped during a police chase, saying the 18-year-old had no chance to avoid the impact.
Henry Hicks died on 19 December 2014 following the collision on Wheelwright Street in Islington, north London. A jury at St Pancras coroner’s court heard that the 18-year-old was being pursued by two unmarked police cars at the time of the crash.
Hundreds of people joined a march through north London five months after Hicks’s death calling for explanations as to how the teenager died. His family have launched a social media campaign and a foundation in his memory.
Raitis Liepins told the court that he was on his way home between 7pm and 8pm that evening and had just turned into Wheelwright Street, heading westwards, when he saw the scooter suddenly swerve from behind a minivan coming in the other direction.
“It was a sharp move across the road, right into the middle of my lane,” he said. “It looked like he started to slide with the moped towards me.” He saw the rider fall over the front of the bike and strike the surface of the road, he said. “That was the last of what I saw. The next second there was an impact.”
Liepins said he grabbed his phone and got out of the car, where he saw the young man’s body. “His head was towards the middle of the road, and there was a tiny line of blood going towards the kerb.” It was at that moment, he told the jury, that he noticed the blue flashing lights of the pursuing police cars, which arrived on the scene five or six seconds afterwards.
Earlier, the jury heard from Christopher Moran, the father of Hicks’s best friend, who said he had been overtaken by the moped and the pursuing vehicles shortly before the crash. Moran said he was travelling north along Caledonian Road when the moped passed his van on the driver’s side.
“As he overtook me, just when he was in front of me, I heard some police sirens,” he said, adding that the police vehicles “flew past” a few seconds after the moped. He said in his view they were travelling around 60-70mph.
“They were on a congested part of Caledonian Road and in my mind they had no regard for safety … A child would be killed at the speed they were going.”
Moran told Mary Hassell, the senior coroner for north inner London, that he had seen Hicks and his own son with the moped at his home earlier that evening, and that when the bike overtook him, pursued by the police cars, he had initially assumed it was his son riding it.
He pulled over to call his daughter to check, and by the time he got to Wheelwright Street, uniformed officers were putting police tape across the end of the street.
The inquest, which is expected to last two to three weeks, continues.
