A US Air Force officer who lost control of her car following a "two-second" lapse of concentration has been spared jail for causing the deaths of a married couple in a near head-on collision.
Jasmine Dessaure, 37, was driving a Jeep Cherokee when it collided with a Nissan Note on the B1106, a single-carriageway road that runs through Thetford Forest, at Brandon, Suffolk, on April 15 2023. The occupants of the Nissan car, Dilipan Sebastiampillai, 43, and his 41-year-old wife Dorota, from the London Borough of Haringey, both died, Suffolk Police said.
Collision and guilty plea
The force said both vehicles left the carriageway and the Nissan caught fire. Dessaure, of Brandon, and based at RAF Mildenhall, pleaded guilty at an earlier hearing to two counts of causing death by careless driving.
She wept as she was sentenced at Peterborough Crown Court today to 12 months in custody suspended for two years. Judge Sean Enright also handed her an 18-month driving ban and ordered that she complete 180 hours of unpaid work.
Court details
Mark Tomassi, prosecuting, said: "In cases like this there are no winners, only losers." He said Dessaure, who was alone in her car, had been travelling in the direction of Elveden while the Nissan was travelling in the opposite direction.
"It would seem that as a result of a momentary lack of concentration and attention, the vehicle that she (Dessaure) was driving lost control," he said. Mr Tomassi said it happened at around 5.30pm and that there had been "deterioration on the road edge as the road edge meets the grass verge".
He said there was a "yawing of the vehicle from one side to the other", moving across the carriageway following "overcorrection". "There was a failure to drive to the appropriate standard because of a momentary lapse of concentration that would have lasted just under two seconds," he said.
Impact and sentencing
He said Dessaure had been driving at approximately 40mph, "well within the 60mph limit", when she lost control and there was a "nigh head-on collision". He said this caused "massive damage and trauma to both vehicles but particularly to the occupants of the vehicle that was struck, leading... to catastrophic injury and death".
He said that the "lapse of attention wasn't aggravated by any other circumstances". The barrister said the family of the deceased "do not want the prosecution to read out victim personal statements".
Ali Bajwa KC, mitigating, said the defendant wanted to express "how sorry she was for what's happened as a result of her driving failure". He said she initially believed she hit a pothole, but "her tyre left the road and entered a trench".
Speaking as he spared Dessaure jail, the judge said: "It's an enormous tragedy. Nothing I can say will make anything any better for anyone." He noted that Dessaure and others "attempted to assist the occupants of the other vehicle but were unable to get them out".
