A much loved gym manager died in a head-on collision after her car is thought to have strayed onto the wrong side of the road, while she snacked on KFC.
Anna Ledgar, 28, was on her way to work at Macclesfield Football Club when the tragedy happened at around 1pm on October 18.
Moments earlier she had pulled out of a KFC drive thru before her Seat Leon was seen driving along the B5030 Ashbourne Road, between Uttoxeter and Rochester
An inquest heard that her car either drifted or swerved over the central white line and into the path of an oncoming Peugeot taxi, StokeonTrentLive reports.
Anna's partner Greg Peters described her as an ‘amazing’ woman who was his ‘perfect’ match and had been intending to propose to her.
The taxi driver, who was seriously injured, recalled a ‘massive bang’. The next thing he remembered was seeing he was bleeding heavily and in pain.
“The collision happened on my side of the road and I had no chance at all to take evasive action,” he said in a statement.
Other drivers who rushed to the scene to help found Anna unresponsive in the driver’s seat and called 999.
She was blue lighted to Royal Stoke University Hospital but sadly succumbed to her injuries the following day.
The inquest heard she had suffered an ‘unsurvivable’ traumatic brain injury.
Anna had been on the organ donor register and her final act was to donate her organs to help save the lives of six other people.
Never getting the chance to pop the question, Greg arranged for a vicar to give a blessing and placed a ring on Anna's finger as she lay in her hospital bed.
The couple had spent the day before the crash enjoying a ‘perfect Sunday’.
Anna had only recently been headhunted by Macclesfield FC to become the club’s gym manager and was due to work a late shift on October 18.
Paying tribute after her death, heartbroken Greg said: “Anna was just an amazing person. All she ever wanted was the best for people. She wanted to help people achieve their goals - in the gym or just in life.”
Greg said he had ‘never known’ Anna to eat or drink while driving.
She had also taken food with her to eat later that day, so he was surprised to hear she had called at KFC.
Another motorist had also stopped at the drive-thru to order food at 12.37pm.
She recalled seeing a woman in front of her collect a box at the window.
The same woman then happened to be travelling several cars behind Anna when they both joined the B5030.
Her attention was drawn to the Seat when it ‘went into the opposing lane’.
Another driver, approaching from the opposite direction, had to veer onto the grass verge to avoid a collision with Anna’s car.
In her rear view mirror, she then saw the crash. One of the vehicles was ‘going up in the air’.
In a statement, the witness said: “I was in total shock at the time. If I hadn’t taken the action I did, the car would have hit me. She made no attempt to get out of the way.”
PC Sarah Mulvey, a forensic collision investigator, said there was no evidence of any braking before the impact or any obstruction on the road, but food was found on the Seat’s airbag which was deployed on impact.
Acting South Staffordshire senior coroner Andrew Barkley said it ‘suggests very strongly’ that Anna was eating at the time of the crash.
He concluded that the death was due to a road traffic collision.
