Tom McLuckie struggled to hold back his tears as he reached carefully into a Coles shopping bag and slowly extracted some small, precious items.
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After losing his son a few days earlier, this was all a grieving father had left.
Cradled in his hands, one after another, were a red P plate, a parking ticket from his son's university, a smashed interior light fitting and the plastic tube used to intubate 20-year-old Matthew McLuckie as paramedics fought desperately to save his life as he lay on the cold bitumen of Hindmarsh Drive last week.
Another family's life brutally torn and shattered.
As a journalist for more than 30 years and separately, 10 years working with the police, the heartbreaking nature of road trauma and its shattering effect on the families and friends of those involved, never leaves you.
The Canberra Times has played its role, campaigning on important road safety measures, such as the need for improved heavy vehicle safety and mandatory interventions for drivers with medical conditions.
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More times than I care to remember, the on-call phone rang in the middle of the night, with the police operations room requesting attendance to a fatal collision. On recollection, the worst period was in 2005 when a staggering 26 people died on Canberra roads in a 12-month period.
Awful doesn't begin to describe it.
That same year, two girls - sisters aged 10 and 14 - died in the back seat, trapped as fire engulfed the family Mitsubishi Pajero following a high speed head-on crash on the Monaro Highway just past Royalla. Even now, every time I drive past that location, unbidden I recall the smell from the coiling smoke and the ashen faces of the crash investigators.
And yet it happens again, and again.
Attend so many of these major accidents and you develop a sense of resignation and despair at how human beings, guiding two tonnes of metal, can be reckless not just with their own life, but with those of others.
Matthew McLuckie had been the blameless victim of such recklessness. A bright, compassionate young man, in this third year of an honours degree in advanced computing at the ANU, he was driving home from work after finishing his evening shift at Canberra airport last week about 11pm.
He was working to save a deposit on his own home; a hard-working young man with hopes and dreams, just heading home after another busy night at work.
His car was climbing Hindmarsh Drive, ostensibly a safe, dual-lane carriageway with a concrete barrier separating the traffic flow, and heading west-bound toward Woden.
Then, inexplicably, the headlights of two speeding cars emerged over the brow of the hill, both east-bound on the wrong side of the road. Heading straight toward him.
Imagine, for a moment, any driver's abject fear, shock and alarm at facing this unimaginable scenario.
Matthew McLuckie was a careful but relatively inexperienced driver still on his P-plates.
He would have had just brief seconds to react, to make whatever terrible choice was on offer in an effort to avoid a head-on collision with the unthinkable: drivers racing toward him at night, on the wrong side of the road.
But what to do? To his left was a short section of road shoulder and steep rock cutting; to his right, a concrete barrier.
There was no escape route for him, no way out of this horrendous conundrum. Just brief seconds of inescapable fear and horror.
Such were the high closing speeds of the oncoming cars that the resulting impact was horrific. That the female driver of the stolen vehicle that collided head-on with Matthew's managed to survive the crash, although very badly injured, is almost miraculous.
The circumstances of this incident are as-yet unknown: the full facts at this time are unclear.
Over many years of interviewing very clever and learned people whose role it is to engineer cars to save people's lives, one particular discussion remains a permanent, indelible memory imprint.
The man I interviewed was Professor Ingo Kallina, the straight-talking former chief safety engineer for Mercedes-Benz, a manufacturer that takes its role in engineering safe cars very, very seriously and spends billions of dollars on this important task.
"We believe we [Mercedes] can engineer a car to save someone's life up to around 100km/h," he said.
"After that, you are in God's hands."
Matthew McLuckie wasn't driving a Mercedes. And even if he was, and although he was just minutes from the amazing skills and potential life-saving arrival of paramedics, the odds were completely stacked against him.
The tragic irony of the fatal collision on that lonely stretch of Hindmarsh Drive on May 19 is that 20-year-old Matthew was from same 2019 graduating class at St Mary McKillop College as Lachlan Seary.
Lachlan, or just simply "Lachie" to his many mates and Canberra Brave ice hockey team-mates, had been the designated driver heading home on the Monaro Highway in March last year. He had just dropped his mates off, ensuring his friends got home safely after a night out. He, too, was a careful, young and inexperienced driver.
With a blood alcohol reading of 0.183 and admitted to having consumed MDMA, 29-year-old Peter Loeschnauer was driving home to Gilmore in the same direction, in the same, very early hours of the morning. Just minutes before, the speed camera near Fyshwick had clocked Loeschnauer at 141km/h.
Loeschnauer's car hit Lachlan Seary's Corolla at an estimated 145km/h and flipped it over the median strip guard rail and into a tree.
The 19-year-old, another much-loved young man with hopes and dreams, died at the scene.
The heart-rending victim impact statements read by the Seary family at Loeschnauer's sentencing for culpable driving causing death had collective heads bowed in grief around the Canberra courtroom.
More tears were shed; more abject sorrow expressed at a young life taken by another on Canberra's roads. And another emotionally broken family.
Whether attribution falls to anger, impairment, or possibly simple desperation, there is no legislation which protects against the recklessness of others on the road, just as there is no amount of police enforcement which can guard against it.
Meanwhile, more families will face that awful knock on the door, where the police prepare to deliver some dreadful news.