Car Accident Victim Impact Statement Example

This is a fictional example of a victim impact statement written after a car crash that did not take a life, but changed one permanently. It follows the ten sections used in the Justice Draft guided form.

In this example, Paul was riding to work in a bike lane when a driver looking at his phone drifted into the lane and hit him from behind. Paul survived with a permanent spinal cord injury. The driver was charged.

The exact charge varies between states. It might be dangerous driving causing grievous bodily harm, careless driving causing injury, or something similar. Courts in every Australian state and territory accept victim impact statements in these cases.

One thing this example shows well: you do not have to share private medical details to convey them. Naming the time and effort they take is often enough, and courts understand.

If you were hurt on the road and this feels close to home, take your time with it.

Victim Impact Statement of Paul Nguyen

This is a fictional example created by Justice Draft. All names, people and events are invented.

How I felt at the time

I remember all of it. The sound behind me, the road coming up, the sky. I knew before the ambulance arrived. I could hear my own voice asking strangers why I could not feel my legs, and I remember how calm it sounded, which frightened me more than pain would have. I was in a bike lane, in daylight, three minutes from my office. At the hospital, my fiancee Steph ran in still holding her car keys. When the surgeon came to talk to us, I asked him to give it to me straight, and he did. I was thirty-eight years old, and I understood that I would not walk again.

Emotional wellbeing

Grief for your own body comes in rounds, and it does not follow a schedule. There were nights in the spinal ward when I did not want to see the morning. I can write that sentence now because it is no longer true, and because the psychologist at rehab helped me carry what I could not carry alone. Two years on, I am mostly steady. But grief still arrives without warning. It came last month when I saw a man run across the road to catch a bus, doing something ordinary that I will never do again. I have jokes about my situation now. The difference is that they are mine, and I decide when they get told.

Relationships

Steph and I were engaged when it happened. We postponed the wedding while I learned to live in my new body, and when we finally married last spring, I came down the aisle on wheels with my brother beside me. She has never once made me feel like a burden. Learning to believe her took longer than the rehab did. The injury reached into the most private parts of our life together. We have rebuilt that with patience and honesty, and I am proud of us, and I still grieve what changed. My mum stayed with us for the first three months. Some friendships have deepened. Others quietly ended, because I learned which of my friends could sit with hard things.

Physical health

My spinal cord was damaged at the level of my lower ribs. I have no movement or feeling below my waist. There were two surgeries to stabilise my spine, then five months in hospital and spinal rehab. My body needs a routine now that I will not detail here, except to say it takes two hours of every morning and it is not optional. My legs, which cannot feel a touch, still burn at night with nerve pain. My shoulders ache from doing the work of legs. Infections have put me back in hospital twice. I watch my skin the way other people watch the weather, because a pressure sore could take months from me.

Financial impact

Our house needed a ramp, a new bathroom, lowered benches and wider doors. My car has hand controls. My everyday wheelchair cost more than my first car, and I need a second one as a backup because I cannot be without it. Parts of this are covered, parts are fought for, and all of it is slow. I am an architect, and my firm kept my job open, but I was off work for nine months and I am back four days a week, not five. Construction sites were not built for wheels, so the site work that led to promotions now goes to others. Steph took unpaid leave for months. The crash reached into every account we have.

Daily life and routine

My mornings start two hours before anyone else's. Before I go anywhere new, I study it like a site plan. Entrances, lifts, bathrooms, parking. Rain changes everything when your hands are your wheels. I am an architect, and I now audit every building I enter without meaning to. I still cook, at a bench we lowered. I still work, at a desk we raised me to. Almost everything in my day is possible. Almost nothing in my day is simple.

Sense of safety

I was in a bike lane, in daylight, in high vis, doing everything right, and it did not protect me. For the first three months, the driver told police I had swerved into him. Living under that story while I learned to live without my legs was its own kind of injury. His phone records ended it. I drive with hand controls now, and at night I can see phone screens light up in the cars beside me at the lights. Every one of them is a coin toss being flipped over somebody else's life.

Spiritual and cultural wellbeing

Family is the centre of my life, and family gatherings at my parents' house are where I feel most myself. Their front door has three steps. My father, who does not say much, built a ramp to that door before I had even left hospital. I understood everything he could not say. What holds me up now is what has always held me up. Food, family, Steph, and being useful to the people I love. I had to find new ways to be useful. I found them.

Who I was before this happened

I rode to work every day and took stairs two at a time. Steph and I hiked on every holiday, and the Overland Track was booked for that spring. I played indoor soccer on Thursdays, badly and happily. I was an architect who drew staircases with pride and put ramps in because the code required them. I designed for bodies like the one I used to have. I did not know a thing about the people I was leaving out.

What I want the court or assessor to know

Most injuries come with a recovery story. Mine came with an adjustment story. There is a difference, and I will live inside it for the next fifty years. Nothing about my future is unclear. That is the hardest part and, some days, strangely, the easiest.

I do not call what happened an accident. He did not trip. He chose to read a message while driving a car through a bike lane. Three months of blaming me for it came on top of everything else, and I ask the court to remember that too.

If there is something I can salvage, it is this. The buildings I design now welcome people the old me never thought about. That is mine, and he does not get credit for it.

I am an architect. Every part of my life has been redesigned, and I never got a say in the brief. I ask the court to sentence the man who did.