Family still coming to terms with Asda car park death

Feb 10 2008 by Catherine Evans, Wales On Sunday

AS HELEN Farr watched her husband drive off to their local supermarket to get a garden shed, she had no idea she was waving goodbye forever.

Dad-of-three Ken, 37, was killed when an unsecured steel barrier smashed through his windscreen at an Asda car park.

At the time, the couple’s three year-old daughter Jess was also in the car but luckily survived the tragedy.

Five years on, his widow Helen, 45, says she feels the £225,000 fine given to the supermarket giant after they were found guilty of gross negligence was a travesty of justice.

“Although my tears have dried, the injustice of losing Ken at 37 still fills me with anger. It was such a senseless tragedy,” says Helen, from Penarth.

“That barrier should have been secured and checked every day, but it wasn’t. Ken paid for that mistake with his life.”

Ken was killed at the Cardiff Bay store in May 2002.

“He had been working nights at the Panasonic factory where he was a technician,” says Helen.

“By the time I woke him after lunch, Jessica was home from nursery and begging her dad to take her shopping with him.

“Ken was sprucing up our garden in Penarth, and wanted a new shed.

“He helped Jess into her favourite pink mac before strapping her into the back of our car, then they both headed off to Asda.”

But not long after waving Ken and Jessica goodbye, Helen was visited by two uniformed police officers, who broke the devastating news.

“I knew instantly that something dreadful must have happened,” says Helen.

“They told me that Ken was being taken to the University Hospital of Wales and I needed to go with them.”

Fear immediately gripped Helen – what had happened to her daughter?Thankfully, the three-year-old had escaped uninjured.

“A female officer brought her in and, as I hugged Jess tight, I noticed blood smeared on her mac,” recalls Helen.

“I simply couldn’t take it in. Ken had only popped out to the shops – now he was never coming back.”

The police told Helen that there was a metal barrier at the car park entrance to stop joyriders getting in at night. It had been left unsecured and had blown open just as Ken drove in, spearing the car and hitting him in the head.

After visiting the scene, Helen was shocked to learn that the supposedly “freak” accident had happened twice before.

“The police discovered almost identical incidents in other Asda car parks – in Bristol in October 2001 and in Bloxwich, West Midlands, in January 1999,” she said.

“Luckily, neither of those had been fatal, but I wondered why Asda hadn’t learned its lesson.

“I also found out people had previously complained about the barrier swinging around yet nothing had been done.

“I was furious. Ken had died because someone hadn’t done their job properly.”

Helen said Ken was a “devoted family man”, who doted on his daughters Emma, now 13, Jessica, nine, and Hannah, seven, and the family were still coming to terms with his death.

“For a whole year after Ken died, not a day passed without me bursting into tears,” she said. “The sheer unfairness of his death ate away at me and each time I saw a happy couple I was wracked with pain.”

And she revealed daughter Jessica was still deeply traumatised by what she saw on that fateful day.

“Jessica was only three when it happened, but afterwards still couldn’t bear to go near the scene,” says Helen.

“We learned that Ken had choked on his own blood – and Jessica must have seen it frothing from his mouth. “Later, she told us: ‘Daddy had blood on his face. He had bubbles coming out of his mouth’.

“Years later she is still terrified of blood – and something as commonplace as one of her sisters losing a tooth can send her into hysterics.” But she adds there was scarcely time to grieve between dealing with solicitors, the police and looking after the children, which took up all her time.

“Suddenly, I was widowed with three children,” says Helen.

“At times, I thought life wasn’t worth living.

“Little things got to me – hearing a child call ‘Dad’, seeing families in the park or going to a school play alone when everyone else was in couples.

“But my anger kept me going”.

After eight months, Helen was told Ken’s death was being treated as a road traffic accident. Furious, she wrote to South Wales Police and asked them to reconsider. They launched a manslaughter inquiry – even questioning directors at Asda’s head office.

Two years after Ken’s death, the firm settled out of court on a compensation claim.

Yet there was no word of sympathy or apology.

“Even worse, no one asked how Jess was,” says Helen. “Almost four years after Ken died, the Crown Prosecution Service said there wasn’t enough evidence to prosecute for manslaughter. I was devastated. How could no one be responsible?”

An inquest into Ken’s death was held before a jury. But Helen says she was only given four hours’ notice of the preliminary hearing and was forced to represent herself in the face of Asda’s top London barristers.

“I questioned every witness myself,” says Helen.

“I wanted to confront the faceless individuals whose incompetence had led to Ken’s death.”

The inquest heard that the barrier had been left open the day before Ken died by the store’s out-of-hours supervisor. “She hadn’t opened it properly and the padlock to hold it in place wasn’t working,” says Helen.

“No one had said she needed to secure it and security hadn’t been told to check it daily.”

Finally, Helen received the store’s first expression of sympathy since Ken’s death.

“I bluntly told them they were four years too late,” says Helen.

The inquest jury reached a verdict of unlawful killing and agreed Ken’s death had resulted from gross negligence.

“The CPS was forced to reconsider a manslaughter charge but its conclusion was the same,” says Helen. “There would be no justice for Ken.”

Two years later the company admitted two breaches of Health and Safety at Newport Crown Court.

“It’s the only time the firm has been held accountable for Ken’s death,” says Helen.

“And its slap on the wrist was a pathetic £225,000 fine plus £42,006.25 costs – a drop in the ocean for an outfit like Asda.

“What kind of a deterrent was that?”

Now Helen is calling for changes in the laws on corporate manslaughter, to make it easier for police to prosecute individual employees of negligence.

“I still believe someone should have been jailed for what happened to my husband,” says Helen.

An Asda spokesman said: “We would like to repeat publicly the apology we made to Mrs Farr and her family. we are still deeply saddened by their tragic accident which resulted from human error and for which we have accepted full responsibility.

“Although of little comfort to Mrs Farr, we have removed all swing barriers like this from our car parks and will never use them again.”

catherinemary.evans@mediawales.co.uk