A retired Metrorail passenger-train driver was on Tuesday found not guilty on 10 counts of culpable homicide in the Muldersvlei train-smash case.
Paarl Regional Court magistrate Anna-Marie Immelman, with assessor David Klatzow, ruled that the state had not proved negligence on the part of Mervyn Matthee.
Matthee’s acquittal followed an application launched on Tuesday by his lawyers, John van der Berg and Hannes de Beer. Van der Berg contended that the bulk of evidence presented by prosecutor Enslin Orange in fact favoured rather than condemned Matthee.
Orange had alleged that Matthee ignored three red-light signals to stop, before his train smashed into a stationary goods train near the Muldersvlei railway station in the Boland three years ago. The smash claimed the lives of 10 passengers.
Orange alleged that Matthee’s negligence was the cause of the collision, and thus the cause of death, but Van der Berg countered that the coach that carried the dead passengers, built in 1962, had rust and metal fatigue in its undercarriage.
Van der Berg contended that the rust and metal fatigue caused the floor of the coach to collapse as Matthee’s train ploughed into the goods train. He said the collapse of the floor caused the passengers to fall to the ground beneath, causing their deaths.
He said the cause of death was not Matthee’s negligence, but the failure of Metrorail to keep the coach in question in good mechanical order.
Psychiatric evidence was that Matthee had suffered two bouts of fainting in the 18 months prior to the smash — caused by recollections of his wife and her death from cancer — and that he had had a third bout in the driver’s cabin of the train immediately before the collision.
Immelman asked, during the application, if the first two bouts had not established a pattern of fainting, which should have been a warning to Matthee that he was not physically or emotionally fit to be driving trains. If so, she asked whether it had not been negligent of Matthee to drive a train nevertheless.
Van der Berg replied that a mere two episodes of fainting over a period of 18 months, together with medical assurances that Matthee was in good health, could not reasonably have established a pattern to place him on guard. — Sapa