LONDON (VINnews) — A British court sent a man to jail for 16 years after he killed two Israelis in a hit-and-run accident while under the influence of cocaine.
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Nitesh Bissendary, 30, fled the scene after ramming the Israeli family on August 11 in the seaside resort town of Ramsgate.
37-year-old Noga Hirschfeld, a physicist at Cambridge University was killed along with her father Prof. Yoram Hirschfeld, 78, who was visiting from Israel. Noga was five weeks pregnant at the time.
Noga’s husband Omer Sela and son were lightly injured in the accident, while her 6-year-old daughter was seriously injured.
Bissendary rode up on a pavement and travelled nearly 30 meters before ramming into the family. He fled the scene on foot but allegedly returned to retrieve cocaine from his vehicle as rescuers tried to free Hirschfeld from under the car.
Bissendary claimed that he had an issue with the clutch of his car but jury members who saw footage from the scene gave a unanimous guilty verdict on two counts of causing death via dangerous driving and causing serious injury by dangerous driving.
“No words can describe the pain, loss and torment you have caused,” Judge Simon James told Bissendary.
“You were focused on self-preservation and fled the scene. You went to your parents to try and hide the drugs you had been selling,” James said, according to the BBC.
“When you initially ran from the scene you knew full well you had run people over,” he said.
Detective Inspector Lynn Wilczek of Kent Police’s Serious Collision Investigation Unit told the Daily Mail that the driver’s actions were “disgraceful.”
“From the moment he took cocaine before getting behind the wheel of his car, the actions of Nitesh Bissendary have been nothing short of disgraceful,” Wilczek said.
“He has refused to take full responsibility for a tragic incident that was completely avoidable and entirely of his making, going so far as to run away whilst his victims lay injured and dying. Denying his actions were dangerous only caused more pain for the family as they were forced to relive the terrible events of that night during his trial,” she said.