A company has been fined and an employee handed a suspended prison sentence after a Co Tyrone teenager was killed in an accident while working at a summer job.
Contract Services Dng Ltd was fined £80,000 for breaching health and safety regulations, and 38-year-old John Fagan was handed a six month prison sentence, suspended for for two years, for causing the death of Joshua Griggs by careless driving in June 2021.
Judge Paul Ramsey KC told Newry Crown Court, sitting in Craigavon, on Wednesday that the death of 19-year-old Josh, from Newmills, outside Coalisland, was a “monumental tragedy”.
The judge said the accident, which happened in Banbridge just a week after Joshua started a summer job for Contract Services, had been “entirely avoidable” but one which had resulted in “cataclysmic consequences.”
He said after reading victim impact statements that Josh’s parents, brother and girlfriend remain “devastated by the loss of a promising much loved young man”.
At an earlier hearing 45-year-old Patrick McKenna, a director for Contract Services Dng Ltd, from Bovean Road in Dungannon, entered a guilty plea on the company’s behalf to a single count of failing to ensure, “as far as was reasonably practical,” the health and safety and welfare of employees.
Their employee Mr Fagan, from Dalriada park in Dungannon, had entered guilty pleas to causing Josh’s death by driving carelessly on Foxleigh Fields in Banbridge on 8 June 2021 as well as an offence under health and safety legislation in that “being an employee, he failed to take reasonable care for the health and safety of himself and of other persons who may be affected by his acts or omissions at work”.
Josh was a full-time student and a talented young GAA player and youth team coach, and had been awarded Reserve Player of the Year for his club Brackaville Owen Roes just a few weeks before the tragic incident.
He was working as a gully drain cleansing operator less than a week before the fatal accident.
CCTV footage from the Old Newry Road in Banbridge showed the gully cleaning lorry driving in the street with Josh standing with both feet on the lower nearside footstep.
“He appears to be holding onto the mirror support arm with his left hand and his right hand through the door window aperture, presumably holding onto the front interior cab access handle,” said Prosecuting counsel Fiona O’Kane.
As the lorry entered Foxleigh Fields a postman saw Joshua standing on the steps of the lorry but as Mr Fagan slowly turned a corner, “Josh became trapped underneath the front near side wheel and contact with the wheel resulted in fatal injuries.”
“It is not known whether he slipped into the path of the wheel or had been attempting to step down,” said Mrs O’Kane.
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