A coroner has raised concerns about young, newly qualified drivers being allowed to carry passengers, following the deaths of four teenagers who drowned after a crash in north Wales. Hugo Morris, 18, Harvey Owen, 17, Wilf Fitchett, 17, and Jevon Hirst, 16, died in November 2023 when their car came off a rural road on a bend and ended up upside-down in a water-filled ditch in Eryri National Park (Snowdonia).
The silver Ford Fiesta was being driven by Hugo Morris, who had passed his driving test six months earlier. The inquest heard he probably lost control when he approached the bend “a little bit too quickly and understeered”. The senior coroner for north-west Wales, Kate Robertson, said she would write to the Department for Transport and the DVLA to raise concerns that deaths could continue to occur where “young, newly qualified drivers are permitted to carry passengers”.
Speaking outside court, Harvey’s mother, Crystal Owen, said her son had been “let down by an outdated driving licence system” and has been campaigning for graduated driving licences for new drivers. Wilf’s mother, Heather Sanderson, said they gave permission for the trip because the driver had passed his test, adding: “I don’t think our decision was flawed.”
The bodies of the teenagers were discovered in the partly submerged vehicle two days after they were last seen in Porthmadog on 19 November 2023. The crashed car could not be seen from the road and was spotted by a passenger of a refuse recycling truck. The cause of death for all four was drowning, with no significant internal or external injuries.
North Wales police forensic collision investigator Ian Thompson said the car understeered on a 60mph road bend, calculating its maximum theoretical speed as 38mph, but he felt comfortable at only 26mph. He said there were “no catastrophic mechanical failures” and the crash was “avoidable”, with rain or leaves not a factor. Extra signage and chevrons have been added since, but a broken fence from an earlier crash remains unrepaired on private land.
The coroner recorded a conclusion of road traffic collision and said the fence issue would be included in a prevention of future deaths report. She stated: “I find that all four young men would have died very soon following the collision, given the postmortem findings, and that they died by drowning.”
