Harry Dunn: Anne Sacoolas faces a tormented life of being wrong
Anne Sacoolas is the middle-aged US diplomat’s wife whose Volvo XC90 car collided with a motorbike bike being ridden by Harry Dunn, 19, in Northamptonshire on 27 August 2019. He died. Early police investigations point to him being blameless and Mrs Saccolas driving on the wrong side of the road. Justice is being denied because Anna Sacoolas, her husband and their three children soon after left the UK under the umbrella of ‘diplomatic immunity.’
Under the 1961 Vienna Convention, diplomats and their family members are immune from prosecution in their host country, as long as they are not nationals of that country. However, their immunity can be waived by the state that has sent them.
But all Harry Dunn’s family have received is a note from the US ambassador and comments about privacy.
Harry Dunn’s parents have been on the TV. “[It was] unintentional,” says Harry’s mother. “She didn’t purposely drive on the other side of the road… if she’d have stayed and faced us as a family we could have found that forgiveness… but forgiving her for leaving, I’m nowhere near.”
Anne Sacoolas is not a child. We can imagine – and it’s not hard to do so – that she’s a bright and capable woman. The graduate in psychology from the University of South Carolina was working for the US State Department in Washington when she married Jonathan Sacoolas in 2003.
She married a man trusted by the US state to uphold the country’s values. But she’s failed. And by turn, so too has the USA. When faced with ongoing, she and her husband “fled”.
And what of her parental role? Reports suggest Anne Sacoolas’s 12-year-old son was in the passenger seat when her car hit Harry Dunn. What did she tell him of her reasons to leave behind an open police investigation, a dead teenager and a grieving family? Does she tell them it was the right and proper thing to do? It was the grown-up thing to do? Only god can judge them?
“Maturity begins with the capacity to sense and, in good time and without defensiveness, admit to our own craziness. If we are not regularly deeply embarrassed by who we are, the journey to self-knowledge hasn’t begun,” wrote Alain de Botton in The Course of Love.
Can it be that Anne Sacoolas is suffering more than in her imagination than she would do in reality?
Posted: 7th, October 2019 | In: Key Posts, News Comment | TrackBack | Permalink
