A DRIVER who crashed through a concrete bollard and ended up on a social club car park after leading police on a high-speed chase has been jailed.
But it is unlikely to add to the time Peter Windle spends inside – because the offence has already led to him being recalled to prison to continue serving a sentence he was on licence from at the time.
Windle (28) of Heathcote Street, Coventry, was jailed for ten months and banned for two years and five months at Warwick Crown Court after pleading guilty to dangerous driving.
Prosecutor Ian Ball said that at 4.30pm on November 6 last year, a Sunday afternoon, Pc Robert Lattimer was in an unmarked police vehicle in Beake Avenue, when he noticed a red VW Golf.
The driver of the Golf turned into a side road and accelerated, which Pc Lattimer and his colleague believed was because he had realised they were police officers.
They turned in a bid to intercept the Golf, but lost sight of it, so put on their blue lights and siren to try to catch up with it.
The officers caught up at the junction of Sadler Road and Radford Road, where Windle stopped to let out a female passenger before speeding away at up to 50 in the 30mph zone.
Believing by then that the car might be stolen, the officers followed it along Radford Road, where it went through a red light at 53mph and the wrong side of two keep left bollards as it weaved in and out of other traffic.
Then at the junction with Bede Road, Windle lost control of the Golf which crossed the footpath and demolished a concrete bollard before coming to rest on the Radford Social Club car park.
Windle got out and made off on foot, climbing a fence and running across the gardens of nearby houses before being arrested.
Mr Ball said Windle, who did not have a full licence or insurance, had convictions for 96 offences including aggravated vehicle taking, and at the time was on licence from sentences totalling more than seven years imposed in 2012 for robberies.
Aadhithya Anbahan, defending, said that as a result of his arrest, Windle has been recalled to prison to continue serving that sentence, of which he has two years of his licence remaining.
She added that Windle, who had had his spleen and a kidney removed as a result of a road traffic accident, had been committing offences since he was ten years old, and his mother was jailed for drug-dealing when he was 11.
Jailing Windle, Recorder Kevin Hegarty QC said the prison term would start ‘from today,’
He told Windle: “At 28, you have wasted the best years of your life sitting in prison and then, having been released on licence, on seeing a police car, whether by instinct or design, you decided to try to get away.
“You could, when you lost control of the vehicle, have killed somebody. Mercifully, you did not.
“The court hopes that, at 28, the light is dawning that you can’t spend the rest of your life going in and out of prison.”
