A POPULAR trainee nurse who 'lit up the whole room' with her presence, died from multiple injuries at the scene of a two-car collision last year following heavy rain, an inquest heard.

The inquest also heard the layout and camber of the road had a part to play in the incident due to the accumulation of water.

Sasha-Raven Brown, 21, formerly of Baden Street, Haworth, but latterly living in Cowling, died on January 19, 2021, after her Kia Picanto car collided with a Volvo XC60 driven by Andrew Broadbent.

The inquest sitting in Northallerton heard Mr Broadbent was driving along the A6068 Colne Road heading in the direction of Cowling at around 12.30pm. As he neared the Dog and Gun public house he saw a car around 600 yards in the distance driven by Miss Brown coming towards him in the direction of Cross Hills.

"I saw a blue car come round the bend and it started snaking towards me. It then went out of my peripheral vision and the next thing I saw was a blue bonnet and the car hitting me," he said.

Mr Broadbent said there had been a storm the previous day. There was light rain at the time and a lot of water on the road which was coming out of the fields and through walls. There was also melting snow.

Dog breeder Mr Broadbent said Miss Brown's car appeared to be out of control and was aquaplaning before it collided with the front offside of his car. He suffered broken ribs, whiplash, concussion and bruising.

Witness Ian McCauley who was driving ahead of Mr Broadbent said he saw Miss Brown's car come round the corner and hit water going across the road.

"The driver hit the water and lost control. I thought it was going to hit me but I saw in my wing mirror it hit the car behind me and bounce off across the road."

A post-mortem concluded Miss Brown died from multiple injuries. Toxicology reports showed there was nothing of note in her system at the time.

Miss Brown's boyfriend, Paul Mercer, said he had left the house in Cowling ahead of her to go to work at Aldi, in Keighley. She was to meet him there to do some shopping. When she didn't arrive he tried to message her. Her mother, Jaki Brown phoned him a couple of hours later to say what had happened.

Mrs Brown, in a statement, said her daughter had a wicked sense of humour, loved painting and cooking. She lit up the whole room and was always there for her friends. She had her own sense of style and loved nothing better than to sit down with a takeaway and watch a horror movie.

"No one had a bad word to say about her. She was one in a million," Mrs Brown's statement read.

She said Sasha had started work with McDonald's becoming a shift manager before changing career and enrolling as a trainee nurse at Airedale Hospital.

At the time she was working on ward 13 and had been looking after Covid patients.

Police forensic experts found no defects with either cars but said the amount of water on the road caused Miss Brown's car to aquaplane and control was lost, crossing part way into the opposite carriageway before impact with the Volvo.

TC Paul Harris said there had been a number of incidents on that stretch of the road and it was in his opinion that excess water that was not draining away was a danger.

Recording a verdict that Miss Brown had died as a result of a road traffic collision he said he was going to write to North Yorkshire County Council Highways under regulation 28.

He said: "This roadway appears to be notorious for excess water on the road surface and although NYCC has identified work to be done, the particular concern that I want to write to NYCC Highways about is the effect of a combination of water flow running down the road that would accumulate and because of the layout of the roadway and its camber actually flows from from one side to the other and instead of staying in a channel.

"It is my intention to write to NYCC indicating that there is evidence from the inquest today and also of previous collisions that engineering of the roadway needs to change to cope with this flow of water that people have identified being the main cause of this incident, along with Miss Brown's driving inexperience and speed, and before another bad winter.

Mr Broadbridge added that Miss Brown had only been driving around nine months and that there was nothing Mr Broadbent could have done to avoid the collision.