Robert Worrall was discovered close to his BMX bike by driver Suham Qiradar, who saw something lying in the road and whose passenger identified it as a body.
The police investigation identified two known suspects. The first was a woman who was found in a distressed state by Surrey Police about three miles from the incident scene, and at whose address a Land Rover was found with frontal damage. She was arrested on suspicion of driving while under the influence of drink and failing to stop at the scene of an accident, but was not charged.
The second was Amir Hussain, a 61 year old taxi driver, who was charged with failing to stop at the scene of an accident and failing to report an accident. He acknowledged having struck Worrall but claimed he thought he had hit a deer. He reportedly said, “I swear on my life I didn’t hit him, but I felt something under my car. I thought I hit an animal, I thought maybe I hit a deer and he ran away same as before.” The defence argued that the damage to Hussain’s car was consistent with having struck Hussain when he was already on the ground, rather than when he was upright.
Comments
This case is tainted somewhat by the fact that Worrall had been drinking alcohol and smoking cannabis prior to the incident, and by Qiradar’s statement that he “was not dressed appropriately for cycling at night” (the lack of legal requirement for clothing notwithstanding).
What seems slightly odd is Hussain’s claim of having struck a deer which he believe subsequently ran off, when the defence case focused on the damage being to the underside of his car. If a deer is capable of running off after a collision then it was presumably able to run prior to that collision: deer rarely lie down in the middle of dual carriageways, and a deer strike normally results in the deer’s torso being above front bumper height, damaging the bonnet and windscreen. If there was no such damage, such a collision seems a strange conclusion to come to.