Drug-driving father, 37, snorted cocaine earlier than killing a pensioner

A drug-driving father snorted cocaine before killing a pensioner while searching for a song on his phone.

Matthew Bates took the class-A drug before driving his two young children, aged five and eight, to football practice.

He hit Colin Banks’ bicycle on the B4114 Coventry Road near Sharnford on January 30, 2022, before crashing his Audi Q5 on its side in a ditch.

Bates blamed Mr Banks for the collision when speaking to Leicestershire Police, claiming the pensioner’s bike hit the kerb and then swerved in front of him.

But Leicester Crown Court heard how Bates’ eight-year-old son, who was taken to an ambulance after the crash, told the paramedic: ‘Daddy was trying to get a song on that he liked. He didn’t see a bike and we hit it.’

Matthew Bates (pictured) took the class-A drug before driving his two young children, aged five and eight, to football practice

Colin Banks (pictured), the eldest of three brothers, was a keen cyclist and nature lover who lived in Coventry

This led collision investigators to take a closer look at Bates’s phone, with analysis showing he had started using a music app about 45 seconds before the collision.

It was later shown that Bates initially rammed into the side of the road, mounted the grass verge and then veered back into the road and knocked into Mr Banks on his bike.

The cyclist was positioned correctly in the road and Bates would have been able to see Mr Banks from more than 200 metres away.

Mr Banks, 64, was a recently retired university lab assistant and popular Scout leader.

He suffered a severe head injury and was pronounced dead at hospital.

Bates was charged with causing death by dangerous driving, which he denied, insisting that his phone was either in his son’s hands or in the car’s central console when the crash happened.

He later changed his story and pleaded guilty to the lesser offence of causing death by careless driving while over the drug-driving limit. The court heard Bates’s blood contained just over three times the legal limit for a by-product of cocaine use.

At sentencing on Thursday, August 8, Judge Timothy Spencer KC said Bates had clearly taken cocaine sometime before getting behind the wheel and should never have been driving his children in the first place.

He jailed Bates for three years and nine months in prison, of which he will serve half behind bars.

Judge Spencer said: ‘The sentence is not meant to be a measure of the value of the life of Colin Banks.

‘All human life is invaluable and he made a particularly valuable contribution to society and to his family.’

Bates will be disqualified from driving for five years after his release from prison.

The court said he will also have to take an extended re-test before he can drive again.

Bates hit Colin Banks’ bicycle on the B4114 Coventry Road near Sharnford (pictured) on January 30, 2022

Mr Banks, the eldest of three brothers, was a keen cyclist and nature lover who lived in Coventry.

He was born in East Sussex and studied civil engineering at Warwick University, staying there to work as a lab technician for 32 years after he graduated.

Annalisa Banks, Colin’s sister-in-law, read out a statement to the court. She said: ‘Colin’s untimely and utterly avoidable death has devastated his family and his friends. Words cannot describe the horror we felt on hearing about the brutal nature of his passing.’

She said Colin had ‘helped shape the lives of hundreds of young people’ in his Scouts role. She added: ‘We have been robbed of a loving, gentle and thoughtful soul. There’s not a day we don’t think about him.’

Leicester Crown Court also heard that following his arrest, Bates, 37, of Buckinghams Way, Sharnford, separated from his wife.

His barrister, Jonathan Dunne, said his client had left the family home and moved back in with his mother after the break-up but still had regular contact with his children, now aged 10 and seven.

Bates has his own tiling business and is a devoted father, Mr Dunne said.

Adding: ‘He’s taken his eyes off the road, the tyres have gone onto the kerb and in consequence has not been looking where he should have been looking.’