Girl, 3, died after driver ‘inexplicably’ drove wrong way down M6

A three-year-old girl was killed in a car crash after a Porsche travelling the wrong way down the M6 collided head first into her mum’s car.

Faye Dawson, from Wallasey, died after driver Terence Unsworth, 79, made an ‘unfathomable’ U-turn in the middle of the motorway and began driving in the wrong direction on November 19, 2022.

Two cars managed to swerve out of the way, but he eventually crashed into Faye’s mother Beth’s Vauxhall Meriva, killing the three-year-old who was sitting in the back seat. Mr Unsworth died at the scene.

At an inquest in Preston, mother Beth Dawson said she finds it ‘impossible’ to grieve her daughter’s death due to the ‘inexplicable’ nature of her death.

‘My poor babe should have had her whole life ahead of her,’ she said in a statement read to the court.

‘To have her life so cruelly snatched away in a moment is something I will never get over. No child should leave this world before their parents.

‘No words will ever come close to the pain.

‘Neither this inquest nor the earlier inquest into the death of the other party, nor the investigation by the police has been able to establish exactly why the other person decided to drove his car the wrong way down the motorway.

‘His actions were inexplicable. It eats away at me and makes it impossible to achieve any kind of justice, closure and the space to grieve.’

Beth had taken her daughter to see the Blackpool Illuminations on the day of the accident.

Faye was strapped into a booster-seat but ‘had moved out of her seatbelt unintentionally or intentionally’ at the time of the crash.

‘I always strapped her in properly and I specifically purchased this booster seat for Faye,’ Beth said.

‘I would not have taken any action to put her at risk and I always put her in the rear passenger so I could check she was ok.

‘I recall seeing two cars moving over to the second lane and I tried to but there was no time. I blacked out.’

Faye was thrown from her seat as a result of the crash and died of ‘multiple injuries,’ the coroner’s court heard.

A large pink banner with Faye’s name and photographs was held up outside the courtroom, where coroner Richard Taylor handed down a conclusion of death due to road traffic collision.

An earlier inquest into Mr Unsworth’s death heard the pensioner’s actions were ‘deliberate’, as CCTV footage showed him driving down the slip road of J28 before making a U-turn into the third lane of the southbound motorway.

Investigating officer PC Rachel Carbery told the inquest: ‘He entered the slip road correctly then when he got to the give way lines he stopped, indicated and did a U-turn. It was a clear and obvious turn in the wrong direction.

‘There were two vehicles in front of Miss Dawson, around 900 metres prior to the collision, they moved out of that lane but I don’t have any evidence to say when that occurred [as they were obscured by a HGV). It was completely impossible for Miss Dawson to avoid that collision.’

The investigation was unable to find a reason as to why Mr Unsworth decided to make the ‘inexplicable’ U-turn in the middle of the motorway.

Speaking after the inquest, Faye’s grandmother Sharon Pritchard said: ‘The reason we’re here today is because that man drove the wrong way, and killed Faye. He killed her. The reason we are here is because of what he has done – his actions. None of this would have happened if not for him.’