Simon

The murder of a #cyclist. I find myself in the curious position of having to explain, for the benefit of anyone still labouring under the delusion that this was some freakish, one-off calamity, the quite extraordinary previous career of Simon Richardson, the man who ran down Michael Mullins and then dragged him for more than a mile under a Volvo as if he were towing a sack of potatoes that had begun to make inconvenient noises. Richardson had, by the time he reached his mid-thirties, accumulated eleven convictions covering twenty-eight separate offences. That is not a record; that is a lifestyle. The bulk of them concerned driving, and they form a sort of greatest-hits compilation of the things one is not supposed to do with a motor vehicle. In 2011 he took someone else’s car without permission, crashed it into a wall, and declined to remain at the scene long enough to discuss the matter with anyone in authority. In 2012 he was caught driving while both drunk and already disqualified, after which he demonstrated an impressive turn of speed on foot. In 2013 he was again driving while disqualified and uninsured, and when stopped he thoughtfully supplied the officers with a false name and date of birth, presumably on the principle that if one is already in the wrong, one might as well be in the wrong with a certain panache. By November 2014 he had graduated to the full suite: excess alcohol, dangerous driving, failing to stop, and no insurance. On this occasion he attempted to outrun the police, crashed into another vehicle, and once more took to his heels. In 2023 he was stopped while driving without a licence or insurance and again offered invented particulars. One begins to suspect that the concept of “licence” was, for Mr Richardson, more of a philosophical position than a practical requirement. Interspersed with these motoring adventures were the usual supporting acts: public disorder, assaulting police officers, being drunk and disorderly, stalking, and threatening to cause damage. Most recently he had received a community order for assaulting an emergency worker and harassment, having spent time on remand for a related cluster of offences that included stalking and threats to damage property. He was released less than a month before he killed Mr Mullins. At the moment he drove through the give-way signs on Dunham Road he was on bail for affray, assault occasioning actual bodily harm, and possession of cocaine, and he was, naturally, uninsured. The judge later described this as an “appalling” record that demonstrated “complete contempt” for the law and for public safety. She was being polite. What it actually demonstrates is that Richardson spent fifteen years treating the rules of the road, the police, the courts, and the safety of everyone else as optional extras, and that the system responded by occasionally fining him, occasionally banning him, occasionally giving him community orders, and then, after he had passed an extended driving test and regained his licence, letting him get back behind the wheel of a large SUV. When he finally used that vehicle to kill a man, the only surprising thing was that anyone was still surprised. Michael Mullins was #cycling home from work. Richardson had spent the better part of his adult life proving that he should not have been driving at all. The gap between those two facts is not a tragedy of chance. It is a tragedy of sequence.