Emily Watson loves her baby brother but sometimes she looks at him and sees a monster. On October 31, 2011, Timothy was drink-driving and speeding in a stolen car when it crashed, killing 16-year-old passenger Ebony Dunsworth. Recalling the night she got a phone call like it was yesterday, Emily says it still feels surreal.
Earlier this year, she had a “bit of a breakdown”. She hopes that by telling the story from the other side, it could sink in for at least one driver.
Emily answered the phone. It was the Royal Melbourne Hospital with the information that her brother was injured. Fighting for life in the intensive care unit, Timothy wasn’t allowed to know the girl was dead. But when his condition stabilised, a nurse told Emily: “It’s time.”
“I went through his friends one by one – because all his best friends were in the car,” Emily says. “Then I finally got to the girl who was in the car and I said to him, ‘Timmy, do you remember the girl?’
“And he just looked at me. And I said, ‘She died, Tim’. And he completely broke down, lost it. That was one of the hardest things to tell your baby brother – that he has just destroyed so many people’s lives and he’s killed somebody because of his driving,” she says.
Timothy, 23 at the time of the crash, will be 30 when he gets out of prison.
Once the life of the party with hundreds of mates, Timothy has only one friend who visits him in jail.
Emily says she is torn when she looks at her brother, 11 years her junior.
“He was my baby brother,” she says. “I always mothered him, always protected him, always looked after him – but this one, I couldn’t do anything to help him.
“My love for my brother hasn’t changed because of this, but also, in saying that, I hate what he’s done, what he’s caused.
“I see my brother the same as when I saw him when he was five, 10, 15. I love him so much and want to protect him, but there’s nothing I can do. He made this choice.
“And then the other half of me sees my baby brother hurting and in distress and it’s so … so … just being torn.
“There’s too many people; too many sisters like me, and brothers.
“We’re kind of torn. Half of me looks at him and just thinks, I want nothing to do with you, I cannot believe what you’ve done, you’re a monster.
“I don’t know how people can live with themselves after this.”
Pale, shaking and crying, Emily composes herself and says it’s nothing compared with what Ebony’s family must feel.
Dramatic, heartbreaking fall from grace
Swapping Jimmy Choos for prison-issue sneakers was a very public fall from grace for Amanda Pollard. Publicly shamed as the drink-driving banker, Amanda rues the day she decided to drive after drinking “way too much”.
In November, 2009, Amanda started a three-and-a-half-year jail sentence, 2.5 years of which was suspended. She tears up and asks her teenage son to go to his room before describing her introduction to Deer Park Women’s Prison.
“They didn’t have any space in the prison so I was put in solitary confinement for nine days,” Amanda says. “They call it the slot, which is meant to be a prison within a prison. It’s supposed to be for discipline.
“The second day I was in there – you are only allowed out for one hour – I just remember an officer saying, ‘Airing, airing’, and I thought, ‘Oh, that must be laundry. And then I found out we were to be aired. They took us out for an hour to ‘air’ us. We were the laundry.”
It started one Thursday night, in April, 2008, when Amanda’s choices resulted in a worker by the side of the road having his legs smashed.
A manager with a leading bank, she was out celebrating with colleagues after winning a trip to Las Vegas. “Only 10 in the country won this trip and I was the high achiever who won it,” Amanda says.
Her flight was in a few days and she was full of cheer. When it was time to leave, Amanda realised it was too late for her usual silver-service driver, so she decided to get a taxi. She even sat down in the taxi. But then the driver said something that triggered an old trauma and she got out. That’s when she decided to drive.
Amanda doesn’t recall if she looked at her mobile phone or the clock. But something distracted her for a split second and that’s all it took. She was so alcohol-affected that she didn’t realise she had hit a man. She continued driving with a mangled wheel and the entire skin of her car’s passenger side ripped off. Only later, in hospital, did she find out that a worker parked on the side of the CityLink tollway was also a patient.
“Words just can’t describe hearing those words – that you injured someone and they’re in hospital,” Amanda says. “It was so surreal. I just screamed and screamed.”
In November, 2009, she was jailed and the next 12 months were spent going over the night inside her head.
“Oh God, the regret. The pain. My son. The loss of control. When he was having difficulty, not having the ability to pick up the phone. What goes through your mind at night-time when the door locks and you hear the slamming of the door is just helplessness and just the torment … waking up in the middle of the night.”
Amanda has finished parole and can have a drink before driving if she wants. “I will never ever, until the day I die – ever,” she says. “I’ll be zero for the rest of my life, insofar as going near a car.”
