The family of Harry Dunn are to press for the inquest into his death to recommend that US personnel at American military bases in Britain should be required to be properly trained in road safety.
Anne Sacoolas, the teenager’s killer, was handed a suspended sentence on Thursday at the Old Bailey, which was told that the US citizen’s car hit his motorcycle while she was driving on the wrong side of the road – or what she described to police as the “American side” – after leaving a military base in Northamptonshire in 2019.
The path to an inquest is clear now that criminal proceedings have concluded, following a campaign by Dunn’s family to bring Sacoolas to justice after she had diplomatic immunity asserted on her behalf by the US government and left Britain 19 days after the incident.
Dunn’s family and their representatives have been working with legal counsel on plans to press for the coroner to make findings in relation to safety at other US bases and training for personnel based there.
A spokesperson for the family said they would invite the coroner to undertake a deep and searching inquiry into the full circumstances leading to Dunn’s death, “including the failure of both the US and UK governments to address the causes of thousands of fatalities and serious injuries that British citizens have suffered outside US bases over the decades and to take action to prevent them. It is the family’s strongly held view that both governments have Harry’s blood on their hands.”
The family have pointed to a Hansard recording of a parliamentary exchange as far back as 1983 in which the then minister David Mellor, responding for the government, made reference to “hundreds, if not thousands” of incidents outside bases containing US personnel.
After Dunn’s death, Northamptonshire police requested meetings with US military commanders to discuss near misses on roads close to the base from which Sacoolas departed, RAF Croughton. Fatal collisions where a US citizen living at a base in Britain was driving on the wrong side of the road have previously occurred at RAF Lakenheath and RAF Mildenhall, both in Suffolk. They claimed the lives of US air force personnel John Biram, 27, Julious Hawkins, 25, and Hunter Davis, also 27.
Dunn’s family will also continue to press for an inquiry, which is backed by the Labour party, that would focus on areas including the handling of the affair by Dominic Raab when he was foreign secretary.
Raab has been under pressure to declare what he was told about the employment background of Sacoolas, whose lawyers said she could not come to the UK for the sentencing hearing this week because the US government had said it would put “US interests” at risk.
It has emerged that the US embassy told the Foreign Office that it intended to remove Sacoolas from the UK after the incident “unless there is a strong objection”. Raab told parliament in 2019 that the UK did object strongly. Dunn’s family want evidence of this to be disclosed.
