TRAGEDY AT LONDON BRIDGE: When Technology Meets Testimony
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By Ethiopian Tribune Columnist
In the cold heart of a London winter, two families, bound by thirteen years of friendship and the tender threads of community that bind our diaspora, found their lives shattered in an instant that lasted, as the defendant would later say, “within a second.”
The Old Bailey has spoken. Ashenafei Demissie, 53, a self-employed cabbie who worked the punishing rhythm of seven-day weeks to make his way in this city, walked free after a jury deliberated for just over five hours. He stood accused of causing the death of five-year-old Fareed Amir and grievous injury to his own son, Raphael, 12, when his electric Volkswagen ID.4 surged forward in a car park near London Bridge Station on that November day in 2022.
But this verdict raises questions that stretch far beyond the courtroom’s oak-paneled walls.
Demissie, speaking through an Amharic interpreter, our mother tongue carrying the weight of his testimony, insisted he never touched the accelerator. He said the car moved of its own volition, that even when he stamped the brake pedal “two, three times,” the vehicle continued its deadly trajectory, striking the two boys and crashing into five other cars before finally coming to rest.
“Uncle Ash,” little Fareed had called him. The boy had run to Demissie’s car window that afternoon, excited about his new clothes, eager for the lollipop he knew his honorary uncle might offer. These were not strangers. Fareed’s mother, Maryam Lemulu, and Demissie’s wife, Yodit Samuel, had stopped to chat as neighbors do, as our people do, building kinship in foreign soil.
The prosecution painted a familiar picture: a tired driver, a moment’s confusion, the accelerator mistaken for the brake. Metropolitan Police Senior Forensic Collision Investigator Mark Still testified that the car had no mechanical fault, that it could not move without driver input, that the vehicle was accelerating at maximum speed when it struck the other cars. He noted numerous documented cases of drivers pressing the accelerator while believing they’re pressing the brake.
Yet Mr. Still admitted something crucial: he possessed no expertise in the vehicle’s software, which remains, conveniently, a “trade secret.”
Here lies the uncomfortable truth of our age. We are asked to trust machines whose inner workings are hidden from us, to place our lives in the hands of technology whose decision-making processes remain opaque, proprietary, sealed away from scrutiny. When tragedy strikes, whom do we hold accountable, the driver or the algorithm?
For Fareed’s family, five members present in court throughout the proceedings, this verdict offers no comfort. Their boy, who called Demissie “Uncle,” who was excited about his new clothes, who died from a fractured skull as his mother carried him desperately to Guy’s Hospital, he is gone. For Raphael, who spent a month in hospital with two broken legs and still struggles to walk, the physical scars remain.
Judge Alexia Durran thanked Fareed’s family for their dignity. One wonders what choice they had. What dignity is left to a mother who watched her five-year-old die? What closure comes from a verdict that places blame nowhere, not fully on the man, not quite on the machine?
Demissie wept on the stand, describing Raphael’s continued difficulties standing, recounting how he tried to stop Fareed’s bleeding with his own jacket, speaking of “never ending pain.” His anguish appears genuine. But does a driver’s suffering absolve him? Can technology become a shield behind which human responsibility vanishes?
For those of us who have built our lives in this diaspora, working seven-day weeks as Demissie did, navigating systems and technologies we barely understand to feed our families, this case speaks to a deeper vulnerability. We drive cars whose computers think faster than we do. We work in an economy that demands we master tools whose secrets are kept from us.
The jury has decided Demissie did not act carelessly. Perhaps they are right. Perhaps the car did malfunction in ways the investigator could not detect. Perhaps the software, that jealously guarded trade secret, betrayed them all.
Or perhaps we have simply learned that in the age of electric vehicles and automated systems, tragedy can strike without anyone being held to account, leaving only grief and unanswered questions in its wake.
Little Fareed called him “Uncle Ash.” Now he calls no one. And the car park near London Bridge Station remains, a monument to the day when technology, testimony, and tragedy converged,and the law found it could blame neither man nor machine with certainty.
