It was almost 2 a.m. and I was in bed when I was awoken by an almighty noise.
Discombobulated, I thought at first it was a clap of thunder, but louder than any I had ever heard before.
My partner raced down the stairs to check on our child and look out of the window. I heard her shouting: “Oh my God! Oh my God!”
By this point, terrified, I hurtled downstairs and found her looking out of the window at a scene I will never forget.
A car—what turned out to be a stolen Range Rover worth £65,000—had crashed into several of our neighbours’ vehicles and shunted them to within an inch of our car—parked on our drive.
It was a miracle the stolen vehicle did not hit a house or burst into flames but if it had, the blaze would undoubtedly have led to deaths or severe injuries.
Driver Arrested by Police Armed With Tasers
Now I was looking out of the window as half a dozen police officers, several of them pointing Tasers, shouted and screamed at the driver to get out of the upturned Range Rover.Amazingly he was not injured and, as he clambered out of the wreckage, he was immediately handcuffed and dragged across the bonnet of the destroyed Range Rover.
I later learned his name was Aidas Poskus, who turned 31 a few weeks later.
Poskus—who was Lithuanian and came to the UK in 2018—was remanded in custody, charged with aggravated vehicle taking and a number of other driving offences, and appeared at Uxbridge magistrates court a few days later.
He pleaded guilty to aggravated vehicle taking, driving while disqualified and driving without insurance and his case was transferred to Isleworth Crown Court.
On Thursday, Poskus was up for sentencing at Isleworth, a crown court that deals with a range of crimes—but rarely murder—emanating from a wide swathe of the west London suburbs.
I turned up to find out the entire proceedings would be conducted virtually, a practice which began during the COVID-19 pandemic and has continued because, as I was told by an official, the court has “limited cell capacity.”
Poskus, balding and bearded, was present on a videolink from Wormwood Scrubs prison. He listened as prosecutor James O'Connell began by outlining the events which had brought him before the judge, Recorder Hannah Kinch.
It transpired that in November 2022, Poskus had crashed another stolen car, while drunk, on the A303 in Hampshire.
He had also been convicted of failing to provide a specimen of his blood for analysis on another occasion in March 2023 and driving while disqualified in May 2023.
For all these offences, he had appeared in court on May 13, 2023 and was given a community order, which meant no jail time and required him to do 28o hours of unpaid work. By August 2023, he had done only two hours of unpaid work and the probation service concluded the community service was “unworkable.”
Tracker Company Alerted Police
Mr. O'Connell told the court the £65,000 Range Rover had been stolen from outside a house in west London three days earlier and at 1.30 a.m. on Sep. 26 a tracker inside the vehicle began to emit a signal and the tracker company contacted the police and told them the approximate location.The prosecutor said a police patrol saw it travelling at 40 miles per hour in a residential road with a 20 mph limit and they began to follow it, putting on their blue lights and siren.
Mr O'Connell said that instead of stopping, Poskus accelerated to 70 mph, clipped the wing mirror of a parked car and drove through temporary roadworks traffic cones before losing control on a bend.
He collided with a tree and several parked cars and finally came to a stop.
“One blessing is that thankfully there were no pedestrians or road users, given the time of night,” added Mr. O'Connell.
The incident was caught on my neighbour’s CCTV camera—although this was not shown in court, so the judge did not see the actual impact. Instead she was shown footage the police took in the wake of the incident.
The police could not prove Poskus stole the Range Rover, so he was not charged with theft but instead aggravating vehicle taking by way of dangerous driving.
Mr. O'Connell described Poskus’s driving as “atrocious” and outlined some of the financial impact his actions had on the owner of the car and our neighbours.
He did not identify the owner of the Range Rover but said they had given a victim impact statement, which said they were “devastated and shocked” by the incident and “don’t feel safe,” knowing that the vehicle was stolen from outside their home in Ealing.
It was then the turn of defence counsel, Martin Hawkes, who said, “It’s accepted that he was fleeing the police, who were in a marked police car.”
‘He Likes Driving Fast Cars’
He said: “By his own admission, he likes driving cars, and driving fast cars, and when the opportunity came to drive the Range Rover he took it and he drove it late at night, thinking he would be undetected, not knowing about the tracker ... he paid no attention to who the owner was.”
Mr. Hawkes said: “When he saw the police, he panicked and knew he was in trouble because he had not carried out the community service work.”
He admitted the incident must have been very alarming for the “people tucked up in bed and woken up by the sound of a crash outside their houses.”
Mr. Hawkes admitted Poskus had only completed the induction day and not carried out any of the unpaid community service work and he said his client had “wrongly prioritised” paid work at the car wash over the unpaid work.
Judge Kinch revoked the community order and resentenced Poskus to serve four weeks in prison for the original offences.
Judge Kinch sentenced Poskus to a total of 15 months in prison—of which he will serve half—and also subtracted the two months he has been in custody since his arrest.
‘Those People Did Absolutely Nothing Wrong’
“All of those people did absolutely nothing wrong. They just parked their vehicles outside their properties and had them either crashed into, or stolen. They are picking up the pieces of the mess caused by your driving, and all because you like to drive fast cars,” Judge Kinch told Poskus.
He told The Epoch Times: “The police always do what they can to bring people to justice but the courts look at keeping people out of prison. Vehicular crime is not high up the spectrum of priorities. It’s shocking really.”
A Metropolitan Police spokeswoman, asked about high-speed police pursuits, told The Epoch Times, “The Met does not currently have a speed cap. Police drivers are trained to make decisions around the appropriate use of speed on a case-by-case basis, considering all of the available information and individual circumstances known at the relevant time.”
Poskus is due to be released from prison in April 2024.
