Learner driver jailed over crash that killed her father and a toddler
A disqualified learner driver has been jailed for two and half years over a crash which killed her father and a two-year-old girl.
Penina Nauer, now 22, fell asleep at the wheel at Kemps Creek in 2017 after her father had asked her to drive their family to Sydney Airport for a holiday to Samoa.
Yet she failed to inform any of her family she’d been disqualified from driving two weeks prior.
She veered into the opposite lane and crashed into an oncoming van.
Her father Antonio was hospitalised with critical injures and died weeks later. The young girl died when she was flung from her baby seat.
Judge Chris O’Brien told Nauer at Campbelltown Local Court on Thursday she’s learned a painful and valuable lesson.
Nauer, now a young mother, cried when she heard she would be spending time behind bars.
“The victims here weren’t strangers, but family members,” the judge said, predicting Nauer was experiencing “great anguish”.
“She’s very remorseful,” her lawyer Sohan Singh said outside court.
Nauer’s family was unprepared for her to be immediately taken away from court to begin her sentence on Wednesday.
They rushed over to the dock screaming and crying. When they tried to hug her, correctives pulled them apart.
“It’s not fair!” relatives screamed as her mother sobbed.
Nauer will be eligible for parole in 2021.
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