After a night out drinking and dining with friends from the United Kingdom, professional motorcycle racer Lance Anton Isaacs lied to police at the scene of a collision involving his bakkie, the Cape Town Magistrate’s Court heard on Thursday.
Isaacs was charged before magistrate Ingrid Freitag with reckless or negligent driving, to which he pleaded not guilty.
He also faced a charge of driving with a blood-alcohol count of 0,11% (the limit is 0,05%), but due to a blunder in the forensic laboratory concerning the serial number of the blood sample taken from him, he was found not guilty.
Isaacs’s hearing is a sequel to a collision involving his bakkie in Queen Victoria Road, Camps Bay, in December 2005. His defence to the reckless-driving charge is that he was not the driver of his own vehicle.
At Thursday’s proceedings, he said that before the collision he had dined with two unnamed friends from the UK at a restaurant in Camps Bay. Because of the amount of alcohol he had consumed that night, one of his two friends who had not consumed any liquor at all drove the three of them back to Isaacs’s apartment in Sea Point.
Isaacs said the cab of his bakkie was only big enough for two (the driver and a passenger), but the three had managed to squeeze into the cab with Isaacs seated in the middle, on the hand brake.
The collision happened soon after midnight, caused by an oncoming car that was on the incorrect side of the road, he said.
When the police arrived, Isaacs falsely told them that ”someone had taken his car keys from his pocket and driven away in his bakkie, and that he was chasing this person”.
Asked by defence attorney Randall Titus why he had lied to the police, he replied: ”My friends were flying back to the UK the following night — it was an error of judgement.”
Isaacs said a police official questioned people in the vicinity, then arrested him because his breath smelled of liquor.
Questioned by prosecutor Michelle Davids, he said the impact of the collision had landed him on the lap of the friend driving his bakkie.
The case continues. — Sapa