A 22-year-old man accused of causing the deaths of Greek Australian teens George Loizou and Peter Stavrou, has been found not guilty in the County Court of Victoria.
Simon Farrugia of King’s Park in Melbourne’s west, was acquitted of four counts of culpable driving causing death and one count of reckless conduct endangering the life of his passenger, Mahmut Temurci.
The jury took less than a day to reach its verdict. Farrugia had been accused of drag-racing along the West Gate Freeway with friend Hasan Burke at speeds of up to 150km/h, immediately before Mr Burke’s car crashed and burst into flames killing him, Salih Niyazi, 18, Loizou and Stavrou, both 17. The group had been heading back from Dromana on the Mornington Peninsula when the crash occurred around 6:40 pm on December 9, 2007.
George Loizou’s sister Anna Loizou, told the Herald Sun she was relieved Farrugia had avoided jail. “I think time in prison wouldn’t have achieved anything, because people are still going to drive like idiots,” she said, indicating that she believed stricter hoon laws and tighter road policing would do more to solve the problem.
“[George] would not have wanted him [Farrugia] to go to jail. That’s not the sort of person he was,” she said. The prosecution had argued that Farrugia had aided and abetted Burke in the crash by racing him across the West Gate Bridge, a claim that defence witness Mahmut Temurci, Farrugia’s passenger, denied.
Both the Loizou and Stavrou families declined to comment to Neos Kosmos.
