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Hit-and-run driver who left cyclist begging for help and needing his leg amputated, before selling car to cover up role in crash, jailed for three years and nine months

Savannah Roberts was traced by police after CCTV footage showed her driving through a red light shortly after the collision

A motorist has been sentenced to three years and nine months in prison after hitting a cyclist, leaving the victim with such serious injuries that he later lost his leg, before driving off and selling their car to cover up their role in the shocking crash.

27-year-old Savannah Roberts was driving on Penarth Road in Cardiff at around 2.25am in the early hours of Friday 5 August 2022, when she struck the cyclist from behind at speed.

Following the collision, Roberts initially stopped and returned to the victim, before quickly driving off, leaving the cyclist lying stricken on the roadside begging for help.

The cyclist was taken to the University Hospital of Wales and later transferred to Morriston Hospital in Swansea, where he had to have a leg amputated due to the extent of the injuries sustained in the crash.

Savannah Roberts (South Wales Police)

Savannah Roberts (South Wales Police)

According to South Wales Police, Roberts quickly sold her car in the days after the crash in an attempt to cover up any link between her and the incident.

However, after extensive enquiries and forensic work, the car was eventually connected to the 27-year-old, who was arrested after officers examining CCTV footage from the area spotted her driving through a red light on the same night.

South Wales Police have also released footage which shows Roberts driving towards Penarth Road shortly before the collision, as well as the moments leading up to the shocking crash, in which the 27-year-old can be seen approaching the cyclist from behind at speed.

Body cam footage from Roberts’ arrest also shows the 27-year-old arguing with police officers. During her subsequent questioning by police, she replied “no comment” to all questions, but later admitted the offences in court.

On Thursday 5 September, Roberts was sentenced at Cardiff Crown Court to three years and nine months in prison for causing serious injury by careless driving and perverting the course of justice.

> HGV driver who left cyclist with “permanent and irreversible” injuries after hitting him and causing bike to “fire off” road handed four-month suspended prison sentence and banned from driving for a year

This latest sentencing of a driver who left a cyclist with permanent serious injuries comes in the same month a lorry driver who caused “irreversible” injuries to a cyclist he struck while overtaking directly towards two oncoming HGVs, in a manoeuvre described as a “terrible miscalculation” by his barrister, was handed a four-month prison sentence suspended for two years and banned from driving for 12 months.

Last week in Bradford Crown Court, a witness to the collision – a brief clip of which, filmed by the cyclist’s rear-facing camera, was shown to the court – said that 66-year-old lorry driver James Templeton was not giving the cyclist, who was wearing high-visibility clothing, “enough room” as he attempted to overtake him.

The witness then said that they saw the man’s bike “fire off” into the bushes, as he rolled down the road following the collision.

After “hearing a bang”, Templeton stopped his lorry and later told another witness that he had “just clipped a cyclist”. The 66-year-old also told police that two other lorry drivers were approaching in the opposite lane at the time, and that he assumed that had passed the cyclist.

> Suspended sentence for drunk cyclist who knocked pedestrian unconscious, as Mr Loophole uses case to call for new laws and bicycle number plates

The cyclist suffered several serious injuries in the collision, including damage to his spinal cord, a fractured pelvis, a skull fracture, several broken ribs, and a collapsed lung, and spent the next six months undergoing treatment in hospital. The court heard that he now requires a wheelchair to go out and is in “constant pain”, with the judge telling Templeton that “his and wife’s lives will never be the same again”.

Templeton admitted causing serious injury by careless driving and was handed a four-month prison sentence, suspended for two years, a reduced sentence the judge attributed to his guilty plea and “genuine remorse”, and disqualified from driving for a year.

Ryan joined road.cc in December 2021 and since then has kept the site’s readers and listeners informed and enthralled (well at least occasionally) on news, the live blog, and the road.cc Podcast. After boarding a wrong bus at the world championships and ruining a good pair of jeans at the cyclocross, he now serves as road.cc’s senior news writer. Before his foray into cycling journalism, he wallowed in the equally pitiless world of academia, where he wrote a book about Victorian politics and droned on about cycling and bikes to classes of bored students (while taking every chance he could get to talk about cycling in print or on the radio). He can be found riding his bike very slowly around the narrow, scenic country lanes of Co. Down.

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15 comments

Avatar
Muddy Ford | 3 weeks ago
4 likes

Where's that loophole cvnt who does the rounds on LBC etc. crying for cyclists to wear tabards and demand a dangerous cycling law? Is he going to be demanding the current dangerous driving law is inadequate for manslaughter using a 2 ton vehicle? Course he f'' isnt. This incident won't even make the back pages of the Mail. The best thing for road safety would be for LBC, Mail, Loophole Cvnt, etc. to be shut down because their actions have a direct correlation to the anti-cycling bullshit. I hope this woman dies in prison from syphillis. 

Avatar
HKR | 3 weeks ago
9 likes

To say that sentence is woefully inadequate is woefully inadequate.  What the hell is wrong with sentencing guidance in this country.  The poor victim has a lifetime without a leg.  This nutcase is out and probably back on the roads in just a couple of years.

Avatar
LordSandwich replied to HKR | 3 weeks ago
2 likes

HKR wrote:

 What the hell is wrong with sentencing guidance in this country. 

Our justice system is too preoccupied with prosecuting people over saying hurty things on social media than dealing with real criminals.

Avatar
Grumpy17 | 3 weeks ago
7 likes

I would have to give the police and forensic services some credit for the case involving the female driver. No matter what we feel about the sentence, identifying her as the driver and bringing her to justice in this case was no easy matter.

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wtjs replied to Grumpy17 | 3 weeks ago
3 likes

 identifying her as the driver and bringing her to justice in this case was no easy matter

I suppose such anomalies are bound to occur fortuitously on occasion. There was a programme recently about the efforts of some Midlands police force during the war to identify a female skeleton found in the remains of a tall tree stump- surveying numerous dentists over dental records etc. The thought of Lancashire Constabulary doing anything like that now instead of binning the case immediately as 'insufficient evidence' and spending time more profitably with the donuts and pizza thinking up new and innovative ways of declaring that it was nothing to do with them, induces mirth which will sustain me over the winter months ahead

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biking59boomer | 3 weeks ago
1 like

Not the first serious accident involving a cyclist in that area. A cyclist was killed not far from there a few years ago.

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peted76 | 3 weeks ago
16 likes

Should be a lifetime driving ban for behaviour like this. 

Driving is a privilege not a right, it's time the UK justice system starts thinking like that.

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Secret_squirrel | 3 weeks ago
21 likes

How the woman was prosecuted merely as careless after at least 2 incidents I dont know. The CPS should be ashamed of themselves. 

She'll be out in 2 years.

 

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ubercurmudgeon | 3 weeks ago
32 likes

Whatever else they're sentenced to, anyone convicted of a hit-and-run should be automatically banned from driving for life. Even in cases where the hit was purely accidental, the run part means they have displayed a contempt for other road users that should disqualify them permanently from the trust implied in the issuance of a driving licence. And it'd be an effective deterrent, which the current lottery system, where penalties depend on the motonormativity bias of the judge or magistrate in each case, certainly isn't.

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hawkinspeter replied to ubercurmudgeon | 3 weeks ago
15 likes

ubercurmudgeon wrote:

Whatever else they're sentenced to, anyone convicted of a hit-and-run should be automatically banned from driving for life. Even in cases where the hit was purely accidental, the run part means they have displayed a contempt for other road users that should disqualify them permanently from the trust implied in the issuance of a driving licence. And it'd be an effective deterrent, which the current lottery system, where penalties depend on the motonormativity bias of the judge or magistrate in each case, certainly isn't.

Exactly.

When someone demonstrates the kind of person that they are, then we should believe them.

Avatar
brooksby replied to hawkinspeter | 3 weeks ago
11 likes

I find it worrying, from reading the news, how many people are out there whose first thought when knocking someone off and injuring them, is "Dammit!  This will affect my insurance premiums - how can I get out of this?"

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wtjs replied to brooksby | 3 weeks ago
12 likes

many people are out there whose first thought when knocking someone off and injuring them, is "Dammit!  This will affect my insurance premiums - how can I get out of this?"

Along with: I was frightened that the cyclist lying mangled in the road would attack me, so I had to rush home for a few drinks and some dope to calm my nerves which I definitely didn't take before I was driving

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DeelitedManchester replied to brooksby | 3 weeks ago
7 likes

I also find it worrying that if I were to be on the receiving end of an incident like these two, the guilty party would get away with the legal equivalent of a slap on the wrist.  Whilst I would suffer, probably both physically and mentally, for the remainder of my life.

Whilst the sentence for the young woman is getting in the right direction, the HGV driver's sentence of a four-month prison sentence suspended for two years and banned from driving for 12 months is an absolute joke!

As @ubercurmudgeo already stated, surely a lifetime ban from driving should be a bare minimum.  Then we can start thinking about proper custodial sentences with a meaningful duration.

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Sriracha replied to ubercurmudgeon | 3 weeks ago
7 likes

Then the law will need to find a way to deal with those who claim they were unaware of the collision - thought I hit a sack of potatoes, etc - which is what their brief will advise them to say.

My instinct would be that those who are so unaware of what they are doing that they genuinely don't know when they have hit another human don't qualify for a driving licence anyway. And for those who are trying it on (the majority), the law can graciously take them at their word regardless.

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Velo-drone | 3 weeks ago
17 likes

I can't be the only one who thinks that if that lorry driver in the latter part of the article had done the same to a car, and inflicted the same level of injuries on an occupant, he would have got a much heavier sentence.

At every possible opportunity, drivers, their lawyers, the courts and the media incessantly diminish the gravity of hitting a cyclist with a motor vehicle.

He didn't "clip" a cyclist. He hit a cyclist. In fact, he smashed into a cyclist with such force they were projected off the road. But the reality of what that entails is carefully buried under diminutive language to ensure that it is treated with as minimal seriousness as is possible

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