A London bus driver killed a pensioner after he leant down to pick up a chocolate bar.
Garfield Balfour, 50, has avoided jail for killing 88-year-old Arthur Gowrie.
The TfL driver struck Mr Gowrie after he stepped out in front of his bus, with the pensioner dying from his injuries two days later.
Balfour has now been ordered to carry out 140 hours of unpaid work and has been banned from driving for 12 months.
He was driving the Route 35 TfL bus on Walworth Road when he struck Mr Gowrie, MyLondon reports.
Dramatic CCTV footage showed Balfour leaning down to the ground to collect a chocolate bar with his hand, while Mr Gowrie could be seen falling into the road.
Despite the best efforts of the emergency services and members of the public, the pensioner died of his injuries two days later in hospital.
Balfour pleaded guilty to causing death by careless driving and had remained working as a driver for TfL after successfully appealing his suspension.
Inner London Crown Court heard that at 4:16pm on August 2, 2019, Balfour was driving an out-of-service bus down Walworth Road when he approached traffic.
While travelling at a rolling speed at 0mph, he made the “conscious decision” to remove his hands from the steering wheel and lean forward to retrieve the chocolate bar.
Prosecutor Wayne Cranston-Morris argued that at the same time, he “moved the vehicle forward” by pressing the accelerator pedal with his foot.
Another CCTV clip showed Mr Gowrie standing at the kerbside with his walking stick and shopping trolley, before stepping into the road and walking in front of the bus, before he was knocked to the ground.
Branding it an “extremely unique case”, his defence lawyer Elizabeth Lambert said that the accident was an “unfortunate combination of events carried out at the same time that the defendant had no control over”.
She argued that Mr Gowrie was in the driver’s blindspot and crossed the road in a way “that many drivers would not have anticipated”.
Ruling out the possibility of a custodial sentence, Judge Nigel Peters KC said: “All cases involving death on the road are sad and are ones in hindsight where things could have been different.
"We all know how dangerous it is as a driver or a pedestrian on the roads and statistics show a huge number of people suffer death, personal injury or accident on busy roads such as the Walworth Road where this occurred, where traffic is moving at slow speed and where pedestrians, cyclists and all other road users are darting in and out of busy streets.
“We've seen on the TV he has a walking stick and a shopping trolley and he's waiting at the kerbside as so many people do, not going to the nearest traffic lights or crossing and taking a chance to cross the road when traffic had become stationary.
“And traffic was stationary. Garfield Balfour has been driving London buses since 2016 with an impeccable record. No one suggests he set off that, doing anything more than his job and doing his job properly.
"But as we've seen from the CCTV, there was on his part a decision which he made which hugely contributed to what happened.
“He decided in slow traffic, he stopped, the foot was on the hand brake, he made a conscious decision to help himself to a chocolate bar which was on the floor.
"He did so by looking down and away from his normal vision, picking his chocolate bar up from the floor. Traffic started to move and very slowly he moved from handbrake to accelerator.”
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He continued: “No one suggests this defendant did anything deliberate to injure harm, far from it. Sadly Mr Gowrie fell over and because of his age, he fell in such a way as to hurt his head and he did not survive sadly.”
While his defence lawyer had argued against the mandatory licence disqualification, Judge Peters said: “The camera tells us what happened in his case, he made the conscious decision to distract himself.
"I appreciate this all happened in the space of a moment and in hindsight would not have happened - people do get distracted in a car, they make a decision to play with the radio, the aircon, the satnav, you cannot use your mobile even while stationary now.
“All these distractions are there, this was a large bus of course, there were blind posts but this defendant made the conscious decision to be distracted and to lean over to get the chocolate bar and to open the chocolate bar,” he said.
“I can't ignore that fact and that was the avoidable distraction.”
Balfour, of Stockwell, was handed an 18-month community order with 140 hours of unpaid work and has been disqualified from driving for 12 months.
