A TANILBA Bay man who used cannabis before getting behind the wheel crossed to the wrong side of Port Stephens Drive and bounced off a gutter before speeding into a roundabout and crashing into another vehicle, killing the elderly couple inside.
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Damien Phillip Swan, now 45, was represented by solicitor Mandy Hull when he appeared in Newcastle Local Court on Wednesday and pleaded guilty to two counts of aggravated dangerous driving occasioning death over the crash that killed Robyn and Ronald Thomson in August last year.
Swan will be sentenced in Newcastle District Court later this year. Swan, a regular cannabis user, consumed the drug before going to bed on August 25 and then again the next day before he got behind the wheel of a silver Holden Commodore about 1.30pm and headed to Corlette.
About 2pm, Swan was driving along Port Stephens Drive towards the roundabout on Salamander Way when he used the breakdown lane to undertake a stationary car waiting to turn left into a golf course.
Swan's car then swerved "wildly" back onto the road and accelerated, according to court documents.
The car continued across to the wrong side of the road, hitting the gutter and bouncing back before the car entered the roundabout at the intersection of Salamander Way at "speed well in excess of the 50km/h speed limit".
At the same time Mrs Thomson and her husband were in their Toyota Aurion heading west on Salamander Way through the same roundabout, the impact of Swan's car forcing their vehicle off the road and into the roundabout where it came to rest on its driver's side.
A crew of paramedics witnessed the crash and assisted immediately.
Both Robyn, 77, and 80-year-old Ronald suffered significant injuries and, despite the work of paramedics, died at the scene.
When paramedics and police spoke to Swan he seemed "dazed and confused" and repeatedly denied that he had been in a crash.
At one point, when Swan got out of his vehicle to see the two badly damaged cars he said: "What's all this shit".
When paramedics offered to assess Swan he told them: "I don't need it... I wasn't in the car". Police and paramedics thought he was affected by drugs and blood samples subsequently confirmed the presence of cannabis in his system at a level a pharmacologist opined would have been "to the extent that his driving ability would have been very substantially impaired".
