A businessman from Shropshire has denied causing death by dangerous driving after the mast of a boat he was transporting on a trailer smashed through the windscreen of a car approaching his vehicle, causing fatal injuries to the teenage passenger.

The Daily Mail reports that 19-year-old student Sarah James was travelling in the front passenger seat of her friend’s car when the mast of a boat belonging to millionaire businessman Mark Tissiman swung out of its mooring and pierced the windscreen on the car, causing ‘horrendous’ head and neck injuries to Miss James.

She was airlifted to Selly Oak Hospital in Birmingham where she died the next day.

Mr Tissiman, 48 – who is the director of a central heating company that employs more than 1,000 people – was driving home to his farmhouse in Bewdley, Worcester with his wife Deborah, also 48.

He had been competing in a sailing competition at Chelmarsh Reservoir in Shropshire on 4 June, 2008 – and had attached his boat to a trailer being pulled by his £40,000 Range Rover Sport. The ‘loose’ 20ft dinghy mast came adrift and struck Miss James in the head ‘like a lance in a medieval joust’, Hereford Crown Court was told.

The court heard that Mr Tissiman had failed to secure the dinghy and had left the mast to move freely – a charge he denies. The mast had snapped on impact with the car Miss James was travelling in and had remained lodged there.

Mr Tissiman was an experienced sailor who had purchased the boat four weeks before the accident.

The prosecution asked the court why Mr Tissiman had failed to secure the mast – and suggested that he might have ‘been in a hurry’ or been ‘distracted’.

Miss James’ friend and the driver of the car she was in, Duncan Smith, 19, had his mouth filled with glass as the windscreen of his car shattered in the accident, the court heard. He had been driving home from the cinema to Bridgnorth in Shropshire and the mast just missed him ‘by a whisker’.

Miss James was sending a text on her mobile phone at the time she was struck by the mast. Mr Smith told the court he thought at first he had been hit by a brick, before he saw the mast sticking in the windscreen between himself and Miss James.

'I said Sarah's name a few times, but she didn't respond. Then I looked over and could see she was very badly injured,’ Mr Smith told the court.

The prosecuting lawyer told the court:

'By a quirk of unhappy fate, at the moment these two cars passed, something happened that led to the death of this young woman.’

The jury was told that Mr Tissiman did not use sufficient rope to secure the boat to the trailer; and the clutch – a mechanism designed to hold the boat in place – was also ‘slack’, the prosecution alleged.

The trial continues.

© 5r1 Limited 2009