County Durham A1M fireball crash

County Durham A1M fireball crash\
A lorry driver who killed three people while trawling adult dating sites before he ploughed into traffic on the A1(M) has made a tearful apology from jail.

Ion Onut's cab is seen bursting into flames in July 2021 and careering a further 320ft near County Durham after the initial crash caused an explosion.
The Romanian, who was jailed for eight years in January after admitting three counts of causing death by dangerous driving, told a BBC documentary, released today, he would have to live with the pain he had caused the anguished families and survivors of the crash.

He had been looking sites S**g Today and Mystic Match and had spent almost £50 to buy credits to engage with users, and was looking at profiles and editing his own over a period of 40 minutes leading up to the smash.

His last interaction on his phone was in the seconds before the collision and he was 'utterly oblivious' to the stationary vehicles ahead, the court was told. Onut did not brake before driving into the line of traffic at 58mph.

Couple David Daglish and Elaine Sullivan from Seaham, County Durham, and Paul Mullen from Washington, Tyne and Wear, all died because of him. While Molly Smith, a 26-weeks pregnant physiotherapist, was hospitalised.
The judge told the 41-year-old it would have been bad enough if he had fallen asleep, but Onut had been trawling the internet for sexual partners, and his last interaction on his mobile phone had come just seconds before impact.

Onut who agreed to be interviewed in prison as part of a BBC documentary titled Deadly Browsing: The Lorry Driver wept and acknowledged he could have travelled several hundred yards while looking at his phone.

Onut said: 'The phone was a distraction, it was a really bad choice.'

He continued that after seeing the footage of him ploughing into cars he is really 'disturbed' that he caused the 'tragic and sad' deaths of three people.

Asked if he had a message for the bereaved families, he sighed and replied: 'There's a million things I could tell people. I want to apologise. I want to say I'm really sorry, because I feel really bad for what happened.

'I feel bad for the people who lost loved ones, people injured who have to suffer with back flashes (flashbacks) and injuries for the rest of their lives.

'It's really hard to accept that, living for the rest of your life with that in your head is not easy either.'

Junior Sullivan, whose mother and step-father were killed in the crash, watched the prison apology on a screen.

He told the documentary: 'If people look at it and think: "I don't want to be that person, I don't want to be in prison, I don't want to have killed three people, I don't want that on my conscience, look at what it's done to that guy", then hopefully they will take something away from that.'

It was revealed in the documentary that the former soldier, Mr Sullivan, is now teaching soldiers about the dangers of driving when using a mobile phone.