Brave Adelaide Hills mother stops dangerous drug-positive trucker on wrong road
A young mother has been hailed a hero after bravely flagging down a lost truck driver who veered onto a narrow and winding road — forcing multiple vehicles to swerve dangerously to avoid him.
Footage — taken in late March — of the 34-year-old trucker who was enroute from Inglewood in the Adelaide Hills to Mount Gambier, showed him repeatedly crossing onto the wrong side of North East Road.
Carly Atkinson, who was travelling behind the truck with her young daughter in the back seat, said she felt compelled to act after watching the truck narrowly miss several cars.
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Atkinson quickly alerted police and recorded the truck’s movements with her dashcam.
“I needed to stop this person from killing someone,” she said to 7NEWS exclusively.
After following the truck for several minutes, she saw her chance to intervene when it came to a stop at an intersection.
Leaving her daughter safely in the car, she approached the truck and flagged the driver down.
“I got to the truck and asked if he was ok,” she said.
“He said ‘I’m just a little lost’ so I asked him to turn the truck off so I could hear him properly.
“As soon as he turned the truck off, I told him he was driving dangerously, and he needed to hand me the keys.”
Atkinson confiscated the truck driver’s keys and his logbook, handing them over to police when they arrived at the scene.
In South Australia, B-double trucks are limited to specific routes designated within a 26-metre B-double network — routes that do not include North East Road.
A police spokesperson confirmed that patrol officers intercepted the vehicle at Chain of Ponds just after 3:30 p.m. on March 25, following a report from a concerned motorist.
The truck driver was drug tested at the scene and returned a positive result for Methamphetamine and Cannabis.
“The 34-year-old Victorian driver, who was off-route, tested positive to cannabis and methamphetamine and was issued with an immediate 24-hour direction not to drive,” the SA Police spokesperson said.
“He was also issued with a three-month loss of licence, while the sample was sent for forensic testing.”
Originally published on 7NEWS
