Tragic detail that meant four teenagers had ‘no warning’ before horror accident | Great Britain | News

The investigation into the deaths of four teenagers who died after their car overturned on a camping trip in north Wales has found there were no warning signs before the bend where the driver lost control of the car.

Jevon Hirst, 16, Wilf Fitchett and Harvey Owen, both 17, and Hugo Morris, 18, were found in an overturned, partially submerged car in Gwynedd in November 2023.

After failing to return home, a search for the group was launched from Shrewsbury.

The inquest also found that heavy rainfall had caused the water in the ditch where they landed to rise by a meter and they drowned.

Senior coroner Kate Robertson will now issue a Preventing Future Deaths Notice to the Department for Transport, which has 56 days to respond, demand action and also copy the DVLA.

She fears similar deaths could occur if signs aren’t posted.

At the opening of the inquest, which took place a week after their deaths, it was revealed that post-mortem examinations of all four teenagers gave the provisional cause of death as drowning.

The full investigation had to wait for the completion of a police investigation before it could take place.

Recording the verdict that they died in a road accident, Ms Robertson said today that at 10.04am on November 21 last year, North Wales Police received a report of a vehicle in a drainage ditch near Garreg had been found.

She said Hugo, who had recently passed his driving test, lost control and drove down a steep embankment into a ditch. All four men would have died by drowning “very soon,” she said.

It had been raining heavily. The water in the ditch had risen “almost a meter” and the vehicle was “flooded,” she noted

The coroner said there was also an unattended turn with no Araf/Slow sign and there was a right turn sign but no warning with the chevron board.

This “was not sufficient warning of the curve,” she said.

The coroner says Hugo Morris was a relatively newly qualified driver but was legally allowed to carry passengers under the legislation of the time. There is no criticism of him in this regard, she said.

She added: “I find that the use of cannabis is unlikely to have affected the cognitive function of the driver, Hugo Morris.”

The court heard how the car went off the road on the A4085 at Garreg, near Tremadog in Gwynedd, about 75 miles from Shrewsbury, the town where the boys lived.

The inquest heard a statement from Sion Griffiths, a passenger in a recycling lorry, who described seeing an overturned Ford Fiesta in a ditch 10ft from the road

He checked the post he had seen on the North Wales Police Facebook page, confirmed it was the missing car and called 999. He said there was some camping equipment directly behind the submerged vehicle and the back window was shattered.

Giving details of how the accident occurred, North Wales Police forensic collision investigator Ian Thompson said the Ford Fiesta had “understeered” in the corner.

There had been heavy rain in the area in the days before the accident, but neither the rainy weather nor the road markings played a role in the cause of the accident.

The inquest had to be paused this morning after one of the victims’ families questioned whether evidence of previous accidents had been ignored. However, Mr. Thompson said police records from 1994 showed no fatal or serious crashes on the curve.

Mr Thompson concluded that Mr Morris’s driving ability was “significant” in the accident, which could have been avoided. Mr Morris passed his test just six months before the crash.

Melanie Hirst, mother of Jevon Hirst, said: “Jevon enjoyed chatting to his friends. He was a very loving son. He loved nature and going for walks. He was very close to his grandfather and enjoyed visiting him in Harlech.”

Dominic Morris said of his son Hugo Morris: “Skiing was his passion. He loved understanding people and exploring them.”

“He was self-confident – ​​a giver of warmth, joy and happiness. He rarely criticized others and loved to feel people’s feelings and identify with them. He had fallen in love with North Wales. His mother helped him pack the car.”

“He was happy and looking forward to the weekend. The world is now destroyed, twisted and crooked. We know that what he did next would have been wonderful. We work, we have friends, we smile and we try to include Hugo in our daily actions, the smiles, the humanity – he is impossible to forget.”