Days away from a dream trip, she died in a horror crash on the M62

A woman died in a horror crash on the M62 days before she was due to leave for a dream to Las Vegas. Kate Swale had been planning to fly out to the US to celebrate her best friend’s 21st birthday.

But a few days before the 21-year-old and her pal had been due to set off, she died when her boyfriend Jamie Hughes’ car careened off the M62 and crashed into a tree. The pair were driving home after he picked her up from her shift at a pub.

Hughes was three times over the legal limit for ketamine at the time of the crash, which he survived. They had been in a relationship for about nine months, the Liverpool Echo reports.

Liverpool Crown Court heard the pair were on the westbound stretch between junction six at Tarbock Island and junction five at Bowring Park just after midnight on May 27, 2023. The car, a Vauxhall Corsa, was in the third lane and Kate was sitting in the front passenger seat.

The car suddenly drifted to the left before hitting a Mercedes C180 in the second lane. Christopher Stables, prosecuting, told the court how the driver of the other car was driving from London to Liverpool and said the Corsa ‘came out of nowhere’.

He said it hit the offside of his vehicle, before careening off the motorway and rolling, before ‘disappearing into the bushes’. The Corsa was then reported as having ‘hit something and been thrown back into the middle of the motorway’, where it finally came to a stop.

Within minutes emergency workers were at the scene. One police officer described the Corsa as ‘amongst the most heavily damaged’ they had seen in their 14 years as a police officer. Hughes was described as ‘shaking and unsteady on his feet, with blood on his hands and head’.

He ‘appeared to be in shock’, his eyes were ‘reddened and glazed’ and his breath smelled of alcohol. Hughes confirmed at the scene he was the driver and confessed that he had used ketamine.

He said it was ‘a way of winding down after work and relaxing’. Hughes added: “It sort of rocked something, I swerved and blacked out. I felt like it was a dream.”

Paramedics gave Kate CPR at the roadside before she was transferred to Whiston Hospital. She was tragically confirmed dead from severe spinal injury at 3.33am.

Mr Stables said: “Perhaps mercifully, this would have proved immediately fatal. It appears that death was instantaneous, and she would not have suffered.”

Hughes admitted causing death by dangerous driving; and drug driving. He sat in the dock with his head in his hands at times, before being handed sentence of six years and nine months.

Sentencing, Judge David Potter said: “The impact of your car when it left the carriageway was catastrophic. The vehicle was utterly destroyed. You left the vehicle and remained in shock at the scene. Emergency services made heroic efforts to resuscitate Kate, but her injuries were so catastrophic that she almost certainly died almost instantaneously in the collision between your vehicle and a tree.”

He added: “The public must understand the dangers of driving having taken illegal drugs. They must understand that any level of intoxication above the prescribed limit places themselves and other road users at substantial risk of death or serious injury. Those who take drugs to the level you did before you decided to drive must understand that only immediate and significant sentence of imprisonment will be passed where death occurs.”

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