A HIGH-RANGE drink driver who caused a horrific crash at Tighes Hill that killed one of his best friends and then immediately told repeated lies blaming the dead man now feels remorse and regret and is suffering mental health issues, Newcastle District Court has heard.
With his car split in two after slamming into a power pole on Maitland Road and his mate lying dead nearby, drunk driver Surinder Singh did something unconscionable.
He tried to pin the crash on his dead mate.
"I begged him not to drive due to having a few drinks," Indian national Surinder told paramedics.
He had been in the passenger seat, Surinder Singh told police, and his friend and housemate, the victim, 27-year-old Jujhar Singh, had been driving.
"I told him don't drive," Surinder later told investigators. "It's not important enough to leave the house but he said we needed food. "I told him: 'no we are drunk we can't go'... and he told me to come with him and I went and was sitting in the passenger seat."
He told them Jujhar had lost control of the car, "cos he was over speed, I was sitting beside him and I said: 'please, go slow'."
It was after 11pm on November 5, 2022 and moments before the crash the Hyundai sedan had been swerving in and out of traffic on Maitland Road, reaching speeds of 130km/h in a 50km/h zone.
And eight seconds after it raced past an RBT station on the opposite side of the road, the Hyundai crested a bridge over the railway corridor and careered straight into a power pole outside The Royal Oak Hotel at Tighes Hill.
The impact ripped the car in half, snapped the front passenger seat and Jujhar was ejected from the wreckage, suffering multiple fatal injuries.
Surinder, suffering only minor injuries, freed himself from the car and began telling anyone who would listen that it was his mate who had been driving.
But it was a lie, a cowardly attempt to avoid responsibility.
Surinder, who didn't have a NSW license and who had a blood alcohol reading of 0.167 at the time of the crash, was the man behind the wheel.
Surinder on Friday faced a sentence hearing in Newcastle District Court after pleading guilty to aggravated dangerous driving occasioning death.
Judge Ian Bourke, SC, said the lies Surinder told in the aftermath of the crash could not increase the seriousness of the offence, but they could be relevant when determining his level of remorse.
Defence barrister Wali Shukoor said while Surinder was not immediately remorseful, there was now "powerful evidence of remorse" and he had taken "unqualified responsibility for his conduct".
"As far as those statements, they were made in the context of a high-level of alcohol intoxication and during traumatic circumstances," Mr Shukoor said. "It does not excuse the lies, but the circumstance in which he made those lies had to be taken into account."
Judge Bourke will sentence Surinder on May 20.
