Louis Thorold: Pensioner admits causing A10 Waterbeach crash which killed five-month-old baby

A pensioner who has admitted causing the death of a five-month-old boy in a crash may have been "legally insane" at the time, a court has heard.

Louis Thorold was being pushed in his pram by his mother along the A10 at Waterbeach, Cambridgeshire, in January last year when a delivery van mounted the pavement, hitting them both.

Shelagh Robertson, 75, is accused of causing death by careless driving after her Mazda car turned right into the path of the van, forcing it to veer towards the baby boy and his mum Rachael Thorold.

As her trial opened at Cambridge Crown Court, the jury was told the pensioner, of Stables Yard, Waterbeach, did not deny causing the crash.

James Leonard, defending, said that "by any reasonable objective test" Robertson's driving had fallen below the standard expected.

But he said expert witnesses would testify her careless driving was the result of undiagnosed, atypical Alzheimer's, which meant she was "legally insane" at the time.

It will now be up to defence lawyers to prove that, on the balance of probabilities, this was the case.

In a statement read to the court, another driver who witnessed the crash, Kaye Lewis, said the van driver had been "fighting the steering wheel but the van just kept going towards the pavement".

She said she remembered seeing Mrs Thorold's face and the "absolute terror of it when she saw the van" before she was "thrown 15ft in the air then landed".

Outlining the prosecution case, David Matthew said that dash-cam footage would show van driver Andrew Freestone was driving "properly, sensibly and within the speed limit".

He added that Mr Freestone had "tried to steer to his right" to avoid a collision.

"He saw the pushchair, heard thumps, saw the woman with the pushchair go up in the air," he said.

The prosecutor said that a witness said they spoke to Robertson after the crash as she sat in the back of another car. He said Robertson told them: "I just didn't see him coming."

He said that another witness described Robertson as "alert, agile" and "able to scoot across the Mazda and leave by the passenger door" after the crash.

The judge, Mark Bishop, told the jury of nine women and three men that for a defence of insanity to succeed they must be persuaded that Robertson was suffering from atypical Alzheimer's disease at the time of the crash and that "as a result of that disease she experienced disrupted thinking".

He said this disrupted thinking could either be that as she drove the car she "didn't know what she was doing" or that she "didn't know that what she was doing was wrong by the standards of reasonable people".

Louis was killed instantly in the crash and his mother was seriously injured.

She was in a coma for 10 days and spent a total of four months in hospital.

She and Louis' father Chris were in court as the trial began, with a white soft toy elephant sitting on a wooden ledge looking over the courtroom.

The couple left the courtroom as around 15 seconds of footage from the van's dashcam, showing the vehicle's approach to the junction and the Mazda pulling into its path, was played to jurors.

The clip stopped before the moment of impact.

PC Matthew Bill, of Cambridgeshire Police, said van driver Mr Freestone had "less than half a second" to react to the Mazda car pulling out of a filter lane and across his path.

He said that the speed limit of the road has since been reduced from 50mph to 40mph.

The trial is expected to last three to four days.

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