Bradford mum's mission to tackle danger driving menace

That pain is an ordeal that Sarah Harrison has had to face for the last nine years after her mum was killed in a horror crash caused by two young drivers racing in high-performance cars.

Her world was turned upside down on April 20, 2013, when she received the heart-wrenching news that her mum, Mary Byrne, was dead. 

She was paying for a taxi journey near her home in Mandale Road, Horton Bank Top, when the minicab was struck by a car racing with another, brutally killing her and leaving the cab driver injured.

Flowers left at the scene on Mandale Road

The drivers, Thomas Healey and Joseph Robinson, who were 19 and 21 at the time, were later jailed for causing death by dangerous driving.

Nearly a decade has passed since that tragic day, but countless more lives have been lost on Bradford’s roads since then at the hands of danger drivers.

Mum-of-four Sarah, 40, is desperate to see that change. 

She said: “When they’re going and getting handed a ban or a fine, or just a six-year sentence like they did for my mum and serving half that, it’s nothing for what us as a family have to go through.

Mary Byrne

“The gravity of it is massive. The ripples just keep on going.”

She added: “I just feel like there’s so much missing. People are very quick to blame the police.

“That in itself angers me slightly because they are just one force, they are a force that is stretched massively due to police cuts and everything else.

“They are just one small part of what could be done. The MPs, they need to keep going with this, it has to change. I don’t know what has to happen for that change to happen.

“It has to start young. We need to be going into schools and we need to be brutal.”

Sarah called for hard-hitting footage to be shown and for the stories of real people to be told to put the spotlight on the horrendous aftermath, something which she is keen to do herself.

Sarah with her mum, Mary, and brother, Ben

The death of her mum is still felt to this day. Sarah and other members of her family have had counselling, while she believes the trauma of the tragedy brought about her grandfather’s illness.

She said: “It was like a spark had gone from his eyes, he massively struggled.”

After being diagnosed with vascular dementia, there were days when he believed his daughter Mary was still alive and others when he re-lived her death all over again.

Sarah’s grandad died and she said her nan then died of a broken heart.

“If I can do something good on the back of what happened to us as a family, even if I just get one person to think ‘I need to speak to my son and daughter about that’ or get that teenager to think ‘you know what, I won’t speed, I’ll put my seatbelt on, I won’t answer my phone,’ that’s one person,” she said.

“I know, in a split second, your life can change. Even if the actions of what they do, or might do, might not kill somebody, but they might seriously injure somebody. That person then has to live with those injuries.

“The driver, if you do kill somebody, you have to live with that, your family has to live with that.

“Your work, your job, it might reflect on a job you take in the future. You’ve got to carry that for the rest of your life, but as a family, it just keeps on going.

“The hurdles keep on appearing. It does get easier and you do learn how to manage your daily feelings because you have to, but every day is different.”

Sarah added: “Some days are harder, anniversaries are obviously hard. They just need to realise the backlash of their split second of madness causes so much pain, so much pain.

“It’s not worth it.”

She said there must be a realisation that cars are a weapon and youngsters who have only just passed their driving test should not be able to drive high-performance cars.

Sarah said: “They can kill somebody, they don’t need to be driven like they are because the heartache it causes is just massive.”

Speaking about her mum’s killers, she added: “From where they drove, the proximity they drove, the day it was, how busy the streets were, how busy the roads were, they could have caused devastation on such a bigger scale from how they were driving that day.

“They need to know what can happen and one person, two people, three, four – if you take that amount of people out, from one to four to five, a family, a child, it’s huge, it’s massive.

“The families have to live with it, you have to live with it. Was it worth it?”