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RACISM CUTS BOTH WAYS

Thursday 16 July 2009

Kingstanding residents in plea over 'death' road

BIRMINGHAM residents were today demanding city council officials install speed humps on a road where a teenage boy was killed three years ago.
People in Kingstanding want cash spent improving road safety in the area where Justin Murphy died. 
Justin was knocked down in Hurlingham Road by driver Darren Bardsley, who was jailed for eight years in 2006, and who, it turned out, had already been given 11 driving bans.
But homeowners in Kingstanding claim little has been done since and they recently witnessed a woman trapped in the wreckage of her car after a smash in Finchley Road.
Lionel Felton, of the Finchley Road Residents Group, was planning to confront city councillors at a ward committee meeting today.
The 61-year-old retired fence erector said: “Something needs to be done very quickly. It was bad enough when Justin Murphy was run down and we all hoped nothing like that would happen again, but that recent crash was absolutely horrible.”
Justin, a 13-year-old Cardinal Wiseman School pupil, was hit by drug-influenced Bardsley, while coming home from school on July 21 2006. 
At the time, his mother was joined by residents who called for speed-bumps in Hurlingham Road.The latest smash happened at the junction of Finchley Road and Ellerton Road on June 29 when a woman was trapped in her Ford Ka after a Mitsubishi collided with it.
A Birmingham City Council spokeswoman said: “Since the very tragic fatal accident in July 2006, there have been investigations into traffic accidents in the area. The record shows there have been four injury accidents in the past three years, all of them slight and none attributed to speeding. We were conscious of residents’ concerns so traffic calming was installed in the form of mini-roundabouts and centre-line hatching, road markings were repainted and signage checked and replaced where necessary. All of this is consistent with the accident record.”