A man has been banned from driving after his company car dialled 999 to inform emergency services after he crashed - paramedics found he had been drinking. Alan McShane, 37, was found to be over the drink-drive limit as he drove home after a night out.
McShane admitted driving with a blood-alcohol level more than three times the legal limit, ChronicleLive reports. He had been driving a Mercedes EQC company car when he crashed, Newcastle Magistrates' court heard.
Prosecutor Sarah Malkinson said: “On the morning of Tuesday, May 17, officers were asked to attend the scene of a one-vehicle collision on the off-slip of the Central Motorway. A vehicle had collided with the surrounding street furniture.”
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When police arrived they found paramedics and the fire service on scene, with McShane. She said: “He identified himself to be the driver of the vehicle. The officer noticed the smell of alcohol and that the defendant was mumbling and therefore asked him to provide a sample of breath.”
McShane was taken to hospital and fell asleep while being seen by medics.
Michael Henderson, mitigating for McShane said the gas engineer was a senior manager for a heating company which serves large organisations. He said McShane had not been intending to get drunk that evening.
He said: “He went to work on Monday morning, he worked throughout the day, it’s the old story of nothing to eat, very little to drink, and the plan of action was to go into town, have a meal, watch the game on television and go home. He drove into town in a company Mercedes vehicle, he wasn’t concerned when he parked because he was going to drive it home...
“The people he met didn’t want to go for food, so he had a drink, and in the early hours of the morning he knew he had to drive the car to work, he was concerned about leaving it parked there because it wasn’t his vehicle.
"He made a mistake - ‘15 minutes to drive home to Wallsend’, that’s what he thought, ‘I will get the car’. Obviously his judgment had been affected by the alcohol he had consumed.”
He said the collision happened after McShane clipped the kerb and the airbags in the car had triggered.
Mr Henderson added: “[T]he next thing was that there was a voice, part of the safety system, saying ‘we’ve called emergency services, are you alright?’ He didn’t know what was going on…Paramedics turned up, I think they must have been called by the system.”
McShane, of Sunholme Drive, Wallsend, was handed a £1,500 fine, plus other costs of £230, and banned from driving for 25 months, with the option to reduce the ban by 25 weeks by taking a drink drive rehabilitation course.
JP Stephen Cape told him: “We’ve decided against involving probation at this stage because we’re taking into account your early guilty plea, the fact that you have no previous convictions and that you show remorse.
"That is set against the [alcohol] reading which is in the middle of the band and also to some extent the accident, it didn’t involve anybody else but you bumped against the kerb.”
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