Vivian Ng: Driver who killed Xunchun Wei, Amy Gill faces jail
It took but a split-second of inattention to change the course of the lives of dozens of people around the world. In heartbreaking scenes, a courtroom heard how one car crash took two precious lives and left three families consumed with pain and grief.
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When Vivian Ng woke up on February 6, 2019 she had no intention to kill two people and alter the course of the lives of countless others.
But that is exactly what she did when she drifted into the opposite lane of a NSW border road in the early hours of that Wednesday morning.
Xunchun Wei, Amy Gill, Catherine Langan and another female passenger were in a car together travelling in the opposite direction when Ms Ng’s vehicle hit them head-on.
Mr Wei and Ms Gill were killed.
In an emotional sentencing hearing, Downing District Court heard from the families of those in the car that day about how their lives have never been the same since.
The daughter of Mr Wei told the court of her “kind-hearted” father and her mother’s grief.
Fighting back the tears, she told how her mother “once cried so hard she fell down on the road”.
She told how she would leave the house to cry in the middle of the night and the neighbours would return her home. How she had such a bad headache she would bash her head on the wall until it bled.
The mother and father of Irish backpacker Gill, 23, told the court she had been away from home for just a month and had spent “three years saving, dreaming about and planning the trip (to Australia) with her best friend Catherine Langan.
Their “beautiful girl inside and out … struck down in the prime of her life”.
Ms Langan, a nurse, told the court she suffered dramatic facial fractures in the incident, which required eight titanium plates.
She now has four scars on her face, as well as shoulder, neck and chronic pain.
“My smile is different now,” she told the court.
“I miss Amy, I miss my life before the accident and I miss the smile I had,” she said.
On February 6, 2019, Ms Ng, 24, who lives in Melbourne, was travelling northbound through the NSW-Victoria border town of Euston in a Volkswagen Passat.
Ng is originally from Malaysia and has been in Australia for a short time.
It is understood Ms Gill was heading southbound to her second day of work at a farm with three passengers in a Holden Colorado.
About 6.40pm, Ms Ng suddenly veered onto the left hand shoulder of her lane, the court heard, before correcting her own vehicle, then drifting across her own lane and into the lane of oncoming traffic.
She struck the Holden head-on.
Ms Gill and Mr Wei, travelling in the rear of the car, died at the scene.
Ms Langan and another woman in the front of the car suffered serious injuries.
Ms Ng suffered minor injuries.
What Ms Ng’s lawyer called “momentary inattention”, Judge Sarah Huggett said was something more.
“(There were) a number of actions or decisions she made in her driving.
“This is not a case where a split second action or some movement occurred,” she continued.
Ms Ng entered a late guilty plea to two counts of dangerous driving occasioning death and two counts of dangerous driving occasioning grievous bodily harm.
Langan told the court she finds it hard to understand why it took Ms Ng so long to assume blame and that she “really dragged out the process … (making) a difficult situation much harder”.
Gill’s parents called the crash a “shocking, avoidable incident caused by dangerous driving” and said they lost their daughter “in the most dramatic and shocking manner”.
In response Ng, through her lawyer, apologised to each of the present victims and their families individually.
“I really hope you can all accept my apology and understand how remorseful I am. I do live with this guilt every day and will continue to,” Ng said.
She told the court she was the one child out of her three siblings to go to university and hoped to make her parents proud.
Judge Huggett told the court there could be no alternative sentence but full time custody.
Ng will be sentenced in December after undergoing quarantine in NSW.