The parents of a 15-year-old girl who was killed after being hit by a car have been given a restraining order to stop them “harassing” the driver involved in her death.
Colin Dawson, 47, and wife Angela, 50, had been due in court to face two counts of harassing Richard Brooke, 53, and his wife Claire Lomas Brooke.
The Dawsons had publicly campaigned for quantity surveyor Mr Brooke to be prosecuted over Katelyn’s death in January 2018.
The teenager died after being struck by his BMW while she stood at a bus stop in Huddersfield, West Yorkshire.
But Crown Prosecution Service officials ruled out a prosecution after hearing that the business consultant had fainted at the wheel and suffered from “insane automatism”.
The Dawsons had been accused of handing out a petition outside Mr Brooke’s workplace.
A court heard the couple had also driven slowly past Mr Brooke’s house and the shop owned by his wife, which prosecutors said amounted to “harassment”.
Mr and Mrs Dawson of Huddersfield, appeared at Bradford Magistrates’ Court on Tuesday where harassment charges against them were withdrawn – but they were instead handed a restraining order.
The heartbroken couple cannot contact Mr and Mrs Brooke or enter an exclusion zone around their house and work for two years.
They also cannot use social media to contact or share information about Mr and Mrs Brooke.
District Judge Richard Clews told the Dawsons that anybody who knew the circumstances surrounding their actions would find them “understandable to some extent”.
He said: “I am confident that everything you did or have done is likely to be a way of expressing or trying to express your grief and a sense of injustice rather than any attempt to deliberately break the law.
