Anne Sacoolas, an American who fled Britain in 2019 after her car fatally struck a 19-year-old British motorcyclist in central England, pleaded guilty on Thursday to causing the death of the teenager, Harry Dunn, by careless driving, British prosecutors said.
The British Crown Prosecution Service had previously charged Ms. Sacoolas, 45, with causing death by dangerous driving in December 2019, but she pleaded guilty to the lesser charge in a hearing in London on Thursday at the central criminal court of England and Wales. She appeared at the hearing in a video call.
The police said that Ms. Sacoolas, a State Department employee, was driving on the wrong side of the road near the village of Croughton, in central England, on Aug. 27, 2019, when her car struck Mr. Dunn, who was riding a motorcycle on the correct side of the road. Mr. Dunn died at a hospital shortly after.
Ms. Sacoolas’s husband was working for the U.S. government at a British military base, R.A.F. Croughton, at the time. She fled Britain under diplomatic immunity weeks after the crash, causing tensions between Britain and the United States.
The United States further inflamed those tensions in January 2020 when it turned down Britain’s request that it extradite Ms. Sacoolas.
Early reports of the crash identified Ms. Sacoolas as the wife of a U.S. diplomat, but at a hearing in February 2021, a lawyer for Ms. Sacoolas, John McGavin, said she was working for an intelligence agency at the time of the crash and later specified that she was a State Department employee. Her current employment status was not clear.
A State Department official said the decision to decline the extradition request was final. “Any consideration related to a criminal case in the UK is a matter between the UK Crown Prosecution Service and Ms. Sacoolas and her counsel,” the official said.
Mr. Dunn’s parents, Charlotte Charles and Tim Dunn, traveled to the White House in October 2019 for a meeting with President Donald J. Trump, who surprised them by revealing that Ms. Sacoolas was in an adjoining room. Mr. Dunn’s parents declined to meet with her.
Ms. Charles said in a statement on Thursday that she was “relieved” by the guilty plea.
“We are going to need time to digest it all, but I made a promise to Harry on the night he died that we would get him justice and that is what today has been all about,” she said. “Promise fulfilled.”
At the hearing on Thursday, the judge, Bobbie Cheema-Grubb, said Ms. Sacoolas would be sentenced at the end of November and ordered her to attend court in person, the BBC reported. Death by careless driving carries a maximum sentence of five years in prison.
Lawyers for Ms. Sacoolas did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Mr. Dunn’s family also filed a civil suit against Ms. Sacoolas in the U.S. District Court in Virginia. In September 2021, a spokesman for Mr. Dunn’s family, Radd Seiger, said they had reached a settlement agreement with Ms. Sacoolas in the lawsuit but declined to disclose the details.
Source : Nytimes
