‘We always said we’d go together’: Heartbroken widow’s road safety mission after truckie’s tragic death
Just months from retirement, a veteran truckie was finally ready to enjoy the life he’d worked so hard for — but a fatal crash involving a semi-trailer driven by someone else ended it all. Now, his widow is turning heartbreak into action.
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Just eight months shy of retirement, long-time truckie Darren Pollard was finally ready to enjoy the life he’d spent decades working for — but a fatal crash with a semi-trailer stole that dream forever.
The 59-year-old wasn’t behind the wheel of a rig that day. He was in his everyday car — a Toyota SUV — heading to the shops with his beloved staffie, Ollie, when tragedy struck.
As he drove along Ridley Road in Cambrai on a quiet Sunday afternoon, his vehicle was hit by a semi-trailer.
Mr Pollard died at the scene. The 33-year-old truck driver has since been charged with causing death by dangerous driving.
Now, his widow Jacqui-Lee Pollard is determined to turn her heartbreak into a mission for change.
“He walked out the door that day and asked if I wanted to come. But I said no, I was busy,” she said.
“A little bit of me now wishes I had gone with him. We always said we’d go together.”
Miraculously, their dog Ollie survived the smash, flung from the wreckage, covered in blood and shards of windscreen glass.
Ollie is now recovering from his injuries, and Mrs Pollard is hoping to bring him to the funeral home soon to say goodbye.
“I want to ask the funeral directors if it’s possible for Ollie to go and see Darren one last time, to sniff and hopefully understand a little bit more of what’s going on,” she said.
“They were inseparable. If Darren sat down, that dog was on his lap. He’s a 40-kilo dog who thought he was a Chihuahua.”
Mrs Pollard said Darren had spent decades warning that Australia’s trucking industry was becoming increasingly unsafe.
“I gotta get off the road,” he told her not long before the crash. “I’m not safe out there anymore.”
He had been looking forward to his 60th birthday bash and finally enjoying life after a career of hard work and sacrifice.
“He’s worked so hard his whole life, and he’s given to everybody else, and then it was eight months away — and he was going to be able to actually live his life for himself,” she said.
A no-nonsense operator, she said Mr Pollard never hesitated to put safety first.
“He wasn’t ever afraid to tell his boss to shove it. If a boss wanted him to push the limits, if he was tired, he would stop, and if it meant the load was late, tough,” she said.
Now, Mrs Pollard is channelling her grief into a fight for change, determined to lobby for better driver training, fatigue management, and an end to the corporate pressures that can compromise safety.
“I’m going to be a very loud advocate for road safety,” she said. “No family should have to go through this.”
“We live on the main highway for trucks to go through to Melbourne. They don’t slow down. “Darren was only saying, I think it was Friday, that, like every time we turn the news on, there was just constant crash after crash after crash. And I said to him: ‘What the hell is going on?’ Like every night, there’s another truck crash. Just felt like it was just the world had gone mad.
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Originally published as ‘We always said we’d go together’: Heartbroken widow’s road safety mission after truckie’s tragic death
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