Woman wrongly told partner died in smash

The Police Ombudsman’s office yesterday told the wrong woman her partner was dead, after a road smash involving a police vehicle claimed a 19-year-old man’s life.

It happened on the Ballybogey Road between Ballymoney and Portrush around 4am yesterday when a police car crashed into the Renault Clio it was following.

The victim was last night named as 19-year-old David Thomas James McKee. He was a front seat passenger in the Clio.

Details of what caused the crash have yet to be confirmed, pending an investigation by the Ombudsman Al Hutchinson.

A local source told the Belfast Telegraph that the cars collided close to a bend on the Co Antrim road. “The Renault went round a bend, then the police went round the same bend and saw the car in the process of doing a U-turn,” the source said.

“That’s when the police crashed into the Clio.”

A 29-year-old man who was driving the Renault was taken to hospital but his condition is not thought to be life threatening.

A policeman and a policewoman are also understood to have sustained non-life threatening injuries during the incident.

Following the smash a Police Ombudsman investigator visited a woman who was working as a cleaner in a Coleraine bank to tell her that her partner had been killed in the accident.

An Ombudsman spokesman yesterday confirmed the wrong woman had initially been told the tragic news.

“We were given the name of a person and in the process of checking we went to the bank and spoke to someone,” he said.

“She was very quickly able to tell us her partner wasn’t killed in the accident.”

* Source: The Belfast Telegraph