Geoffrey and Karen Boucher were crossing State Highway 2 in July 2022 when they were struck and killed by a motorcyclist.
Geoffrey and Karen Boucher were crossing State Highway 2 in July 2022 when they were struck and killed by a motorcyclist.
Geoffrey and Karen Boucher were killed when they were struck by a motorcycle while crossing State Highway 2 in July 2022.
A 60-year-old man with interim name suppression is being tried for manslaughter in the High Court at Rotorua.
The Crown claims he was speeding and didn’t stop at the light. His lawyer says the pedestrian crossing is “inherently dangerous”.
“The question kept coming over and over ... Why?”
A 60-year-old motorcyclist who struck Geoffrey and Karen Boucher in 2022, as they crossed State Highway 2 in Bethlehem, says he kept returning to the scene to understand why he did not see the pair.
A motorcycle rider said he returned to the scene of the collision, where two pedestrians were killed, to try and understand 'why' he didn't see them.
The Crown alleges the man saw the red traffic lights that controlled the pedestrian crossing, but was travelling too fast to stop.
He denies seeing the lights, or the pedestrians, and said he did not realise he had hit people until after his motorcycle was lifted off Geoffrey Boucher.
Defence counsel Ron Mansfield, KC, told the jury it was accepted the man was speeding and was at fault, but the question remained whether the crossing was as safe as it could have been or could have been more visible.
The defence brought to light, during cross-examination of the police crash investigator, that on the night in question, an overhanging traffic light board in the centre had been missing.
The rider said the only traffic light he recalled seeing was a green light in the centre of the road.
Under cross-examination, he said he saw it before he entered the Bethlehem roundabout and believed it was a light for the second set of traffic lights further down the stretch of road, which led him to believe he had a clear run until that point.
He gave evidence that after the incident he went back to the pedestrian crossing — taking measurements, photos and videos — to understand why he had not seen the first set of lights.
The defence played a video taken during one of his visits. It showed him using the pedestrian crossing at night and timing the light phases.
As he got to the middle pedestrian refuge, he stopped instead of continuing as the light directed.
Just after he stopped, a car was shown to zoom across the pedestrian crossing, running a red light, just as he had done on the night in question. He caught the red-light runner on camera.
The defence said this showed the tendency of drivers to fail to see the red lights.
However, prosecutor Ian Murray had a different take when he cross-examined the rider on his video.
Prosecutors Ian Murray and Camille Houia are leading the Crown case in a manslaughter trial in the High Court at Rotorua.
“It’s really lucky you didn’t walk out there because that car is coming?” Murray said.
“Yeah, well that’s what I mean ... the Bouchers just jumped into my head and I thought, ‘Oh, wait a minute, this is where I hit them, and I just stopped dead still ... I don’t why’,” the rider said.
“It’s almost like you knew the car was coming,” Murray retorted.
“No,” said the man.
“This car goes flashing through, and that really helps your case, doesn’t it? Because this is such a dangerous crossing ... ”
The man said that at the time of video he had not been charged and was “not trying to prove anything”.
He said he was focused on, “How can I help the Bouchers? Because two innocent people are dead ... Why? That was my question, why?”
Murray said the rider was trying to set up an “innocent explanation” for his speeding into the two pedestrians because he “knew what was coming” — referring to criminal charges — and had staged the video.
The Crown also suggested the man had started a petition in a further attempt to cover his actions.
The petition asked for a safety review of the pedestrian crossing, and during the man’s evidence, he said he had done it because he had not wanted the Bouchers’ loss of life “to be a waste”.
He’d received hundreds of signatures on the petition.
The Bethlehem pedestrian crossing where Geoffrey and Karen Boucher were killed. Photo / Mead Norton
Murray suggested the petition “wasn’t about community spirit, it was trying to help your case”.
The man denied this, saying he wanted answers and did not want a similar incidentto happen again.
“I wanted to know why I didn’t see them, and that red-light runner told me exactly what I needed to see ... there’s obviously a problem with that intersection,” the man said.
A Tauranga City Council report said that over five years, just over 47 million motorist trips had been made on that section of road, with 18 reported incidents between the two Bethlehem roundabouts during that period.
The only incident of pedestrians being hit was the Bouchers’ deaths in July 2022.
The rider said, under cross-examination, he wished he could understand why he had not seen the Bouchers or the red light, but all he could see was a green light in the distance.
He accepted he must have seen something at the last minute, as his brake lights were seen on CCTV footage coming on within a second of the collision, but he has no memory of seeing anything, nor applying the brakes.
Murray put to him that he did remember seeing the red lights, but because he was travelling about 70km/h, in a 50km/h speed zone, he couldn’t stop in time.
“I must have seen something, but I don’t know what ... I can’t explain it. I don’t remember seeing the Bouchers,” he said.
He said even at the speed he’d been travelling, he would have been able to stop if he’d seen the lights, or the couple on the pedestrian crossing.
The trial continues.
HannahBartlettis a Tauranga-based Open Justice reporter at NZME. She previously covered court and local government for the Nelson Mail, and before that was a radio reporter at Newstalk ZB.
