A schoolboy who killed a Black Country lorry driver by dropping a breeze block into his cab from a road bridge has been locked up.
A judge ordered that 15-year-old Dean Ingram should be named and shamed after he admitted causing the death of Laurence McCourt last July.
Mr McCourt, aged 68, of Sandwell, died instantly when the block was thrown into his cab from a motorway bridge.
Ingram was sentenced to more than three years custody by Judge Charles Wide at Northampton Crown Court yesterday.
Ingram’s friend Jamie Winter was handed a 12-month detention and training order for his part in the late night spree of anti-social behaviour which led to Mr McCourt’s death.
Prosecutor Mr Nicholas Dean told the court the two boys and another friend had been out, unsupervised, in the early hours of July 27 last year when the fatal attack too place.He said the boys had already stolen bicycles before they arrived at the Doddington road bridge over the A45 near Wellingborough, Northants, at about 3.30am.
The court heard Winter was the first of the boys to throw a breeze block onto the road.
The two boys then fetched another block, weighing 44lbs, and Ingram let it fall onto the road at the precise moment Mr McCourt’s lorry was passing underneath.
Mr Dean said: “Although it was not yet light, the road was fairly straight and it would have been obvious from the noise of the lorry and its headlights that it was approaching.”
He said Mr McCourt was hit in the chest by the breeze block after it crashed through his windscreen.
Barristers Mr Fergus Gow and Mr Steven Evans, who were defending the boys, said the youths would not necessarily have understood the seriousness of what they had done when they committed the offence.
Ingram, of Wellingborough, Northants, was sentenced to 40 months in a young offenders’ institute for manslaughter. Winter, of Wellingborough, was given a 12-month detention and training order.
Mr McCourt, originally from Northern Ireland, was known as Len and lived alone. He was described by his family as a “quiet, peaceful and very private man.”
By Emma Sloper
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