The British parents, who lost their teenage son in a road accident allegedly involving a US diplomat wife’s Anne Sacoolas, have told reporters that during their visit to the White House on Tuesday, they rejected President Donald Trump’s offer to meet Sacoolas who was waiting for them in “the room next door.”
Charlotte Charles and Tim Dunn said that Trump dropped “the bombshell soon after we walked in the room: Anne Sacoolas was in the building and was willing to meet with us.”
“We made it very clear that, as we’ve said all along, we will meet with her and we would still love to meet with her but it has to be on our terms and on UK soil,” Charles added.
She also emphasised that it was “not appropriate to meet her without therapists and mediators for us as a family but also for her.”
“So, upon leaving the meeting and ending the meeting, I said, ‘If it was your 19-year-old son, or your son no matter what age, you would be doing the same as me.’ And he actually grabbed hold of my hand little bit tighter and he said, ‘Yes, I would be. Maybe we’ll try and push this from a different angle,’” Charles said.
She expressed “that tiny little bit of hope” that Trump will “take another look and maybe work harder” for them despite the fact that during the Tuesday meeting, Trump did not suggest that he would send Sacoolas back to the UK.
The meeting came as a spokesman from Sacoolas’ law firm Arnold & Porter said that she had admitted that she was driving on the wrong side of the road and that she “had no time to react when she saw the motorbike – the crash happened too fast.”
“Anne stayed on the scene of the accident to assist. She spoke to Harry Dunn to tell him that she would call for help. She waved down another car,” the spokesman noted.
He added that a mother-of-three, Sacoolas wants to meet Dunn’s parents to “apologise and take responsibility.”
Deadly Road Accident Involving Sacoolas
19-year-old Dunn died in August in a head-on collision between his motorcycle and a car driven by Sacoolas outside a British air force base used by the Americans in Northamptonshire. The road accident was followed by the 42-year-old claiming diplomatic immunity and flying back to the US.
UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson has demanded that Sacoolas should return to Britain, adding, “I do not think that it can be right to use the process of diplomatic immunity for this type of purpose.”
In a letter to Dunn’s family, UK Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab insisted that both the UK and US governments currently consider Sacoolas's immunity irrelevant.