19-year-old died

Slept with his eyes open: bus driver sentenced

A young driver has driven the Flixbus from Prague via Carinthia to Trieste hundreds of times. But in the early hours of September 19 last year, he was unable to concentrate and his eyes closed - these "microsleep events" resulted in the death of a young woman and dozens of injured passengers near Micheldorf.

"I'm terribly sorry," the 27-year-old, who has been working as a bus driver for five years, affirms at the trial at Klagenfurt Regional Court. At the moment, however, he only drives in Prague's urban traffic - after what happened, he will no longer get on a long-distance coach. And what exactly happened on the B317 near Micheldorf in Carinthia?

Expert Marianne Kraut analyzed the accident in detail - using evidence, drone flights and, above all, more than 100 (!) video sequences from the dashcam that Flix buses have on board. "The camera shows the driver and also the view of the road," explains expert witness Judge Michaela Sanin. Short sequences show that the bus was already "out of its lane", crossing the guidelines and into the oncoming lane.

The young bus driver, a native of Ukraine, affirmed how sorry he was for the accident. He has been driving buses for several years and knows the route to Trieste well.(Bild: Kerstin Wassermann)

 "He was driving in serpentine lines," reported a car driver who had been driving behind the bus. The reason for this was neither drunkenness nor overwork; the driver was a professional and had also had a longer break beforehand. "But it was fatigue," says DI Kraut. "Professional drivers and frequent drivers manage to block it out for longer and even learn to keep their eyes open even though they fall asleep. They really do steer the vehicle in their sleep, so to speak, but of course they can no longer react."

In this case, it was a bend in the highway. The bus drove straight ahead and crashed into a wall at 100 kilometers per hour, skidded 40 meters across the road before overturning in the ditch in the meadow. Most of the 50 passengers from all over the world - from Upper Austria to Mexico and New Zealand - were injured, many of them seriously. A 19-year-old woman from Upper Austria was thrown out of the wreck and all help came too late for her.

Nevertheless, the family of the deceased young woman shows compassion towards the bus driver, as her lawyer emphasizes: "It is important to her that she does not want to burden the defendant financially; parents and siblings know that he is also struggling."

Two years conditional imprisonment
The sentence for gross negligence manslaughter also takes this into account: two years' imprisonment, suspended in full. Judge Sanin: "It was so-called microsleep events that caused the accident. A conditional sentence seems appropriate to me."

Everyone else agrees - the defendant accepts as does public prosecutor Lisa Kuschinsky. The criminal proceedings surrounding the accident in Micheldorf are thus legally concluded and the negotiations for insurance benefits for the many victims begin.