Taxi driver given suspended sentence for 2017 death of teenage pedestrian
Court rules victim partly to blame, but accused drove ‘excessively’ fast with defective brakes
A taxi driver was handed a 24-month jail term suspended for four years after he was found guilty of killing a Romanian teenager in 2017.
Luciano Tabone had been arraigned and charged with causing the death of Loredana Nemes when he hit her in the Regional Road tunnel on July 12, 2017 at 4.30am. She was 19 years old.
Tabone was also accused of driving in a negligent, reckless and dangerous manner, as well as over-speeding.
The victim’s boyfriend, Luciano Agostino, a Brazilian national living in Rome who had been in Malta for five months, had testified in court that the night before the incident, the pair had gone out to meet his brother. They went to eat before going for a drink.
They then returned home on foot around 2am.
At their house, they argued and Agostini packed his belongings and started to walk back to Paceville to go to stay with his brother, who was in Malta on holiday.
The man told the court that he was not aware that Nemes had followed him, but after entering the tunnel he had heard an impact and saw the Romanian woman in the middle of the road before she “flew”.
A court-appointed expert established that Tabone stopped at 42.7 metres away from the point of impact. In his report, the expert conceded that there could have been contributory negligence on the victim’s part since the driver did not expect to find someone in the middle of the road under the tunnel.
However, it was also concluded that Tabone failed to keep a proper lookout considering that the tunnel was adequately lit. It was also determined that the man was driving the vehicle with defective brakes at an excessive speed, calculated to be between 82 and 105 kilometres an hour.
The expert concluded that had the driver been driving more cautiously and not speeding, he would have probably seen the pedestrian in the middle of the road.
The court observed that in this case, there was an element of contributory negligence on the victim’s part, with toxicological results showing that she had a high level of alcohol – a factor that could have contributed to lack of attention on the victim’s part while crossing the road where there is no pedestrian crossing.
The court handed Tabone a 24-month prison term suspended for four years. He was disqualified from holding a driving licence for a year and ordered to pay €3,051 in court expenses.
The judgment was handed down on December 4.
Magistrate Astrid May Grima presided.