Children sue drunk driver who killed their parents on millionaires' row

 
Benedict Moore-Bridger18 September 2013
WEST END FINAL

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The children of a wealthy London couple mown down outside football manager Harry Redknapp’s home by a tycoon’s drunken son are suing him for hundreds of thousands of pounds.

Jonathan Knowles, 33, was jailed for seven years after killing Alan and Rochelle Bernard in Sandbanks, Dorset. He had been drowning his sorrows after being made bankrupt when he decided to drive his mother’s £60,000 Mercedes sports car 300 yards home.

Witnesses told how he was speeding around the millionaires’ row “like a Formula 1 driver” before losing control and mounting the pavement, smashing into the couple and killing them almost instantly.

Mr Bernard, 53, who ran the family’s home extension firm, and his 51-year-old wife were walking to their holiday home having spent the evening at the same restaurant as Knowles when the crash occurred in September 2010.

Knowles, whose parents live in a £4 million seafront home on Sandbanks, was arrested at the scene. Police said he was travelling at around 60 miles per hour when the collision happened yards from Queens Park Rangers boss Redknapp’s harbourside home.

He was jailed after pleading guilty to two counts of causing death by dangerous driving as well as grievous bodily harm for injuring Bernard family friend Penny Michalowski, a singing coach, and also failing to provide a breath sample.

The couple’s children James, 30, who now runs the family business, law graduate Robert, 27, and Natasha, 21, who has appeared in a number of West End shows and is friends with the family of 18-year-old Kirstie Trup - who was attacked with acid in Zanzibar along with her friend Katie Gee - are now suing him for more than £300,000 under the Fatal Accidents Act as dependants of the dead couple.

In papers lodged at the High Court, they state their parents’ death was caused by “negligence”.

They say Knowles drove at excessive speed while drunk, failed to keep any proper lookout, failed to notice the couple or take steps to avoid hitting them as he drove on to the pavement.

Their solicitor Warren Collins, head of catastrophic injury claims at Simpson Millar, who lodged the writ, said: “These are three young people who have lost both their parents in very tragic circumstances.”

Bournemouth crown court was told in 2011 that Knowles had built up a small property portfolio which had suffered due to the economic downturn, resulting in him being made bankrupt.

A day later, on September 11, he was drinking in the Cafe Shore restaurant in Sandbanks.

The Bernards, from Northwood, their daughter and a friend of hers had enjoyed a meal there at the same time with Ms Michalowski and her son Lawrence.

The children left the restaurant at 10pm to attend a beach party and the adults started walking the 500 yards home at 10.30pm.

Minutes later Knowles was seen staggering out of the restaurant and getting in the passenger side of the Mercedes CLK350 convertible before “falling” into the driver’s seat.

Witnesses heard the wheels screech as he sped away, weaving from side to side as if he was “warming up the tyres like a Formula 1 driver”, the court heard.

Jailing him, judge Samuel Wiggs said: “The tragedy is almost impossible to describe.”

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