Kelda Cray was thirty-one. She worked at a distribution centre on the Harlan road on a shift pattern that I have seen in the papers and would not wish on anybody.
On the nineteenth of December she had done a double. She had picked Immy up from her mother’s — Immy’s grandmother, Pamela, who has dementia and who went into residential care in the March of 2023, which is the whole reason there was nobody to take that child.
There was no drink. There was nothing in her system at all. The collision investigator’s view, in careful language, is that she most probably fell asleep for a few seconds on a bend at the end of a fourteen-hour day, eight days before Christmas, with her daughter behind her.
And I have had to sit with the fact that the woman who killed my son is the mother of my daughter, and that she was a thirty-one-year-old doing a double shift in December, and that if you had described her to me in any other context I would have felt nothing but sympathy for her.
