A SOLICITOR was killed when he was struck by a taxi while walking home following a day out drinking.

Morfa Nefyn raised Dafydd Tudur was walking towards his Y Felinheli home during the early hours of Sunday, 22 March, last year, when he was hit by a Skoda.

An inquest at Caernarfon last Wednesday heard how the 27-year-old Aberystwyth University law graduate had been drinking with friends from lunchtime until after midnight on Saturday, 21 March, a day when three Six Nations rugby matches were played back-to-back.

The solicitor watched the rugby at Y Felinheli before heading into Caernarfon for the evening.

Later that night, he decided to walk the four miles home but took a short cut along the A487 at the unlit Y Felinheli bypass.

It was while on the bypass, which has no pavements, that he walked into the oncoming taxi.

The inquest heard that Mr Tudur was wearing dark clothes and that cab driver Terry Moxon would have had no time in which to prevent his vehicle from striking the solicitor.

Friend Carwyn Williams told the inquest that he and Mr Tudur had been together all day and that he last saw him at the Castle pub in Caernarfon.

He said they had been drinking all day but that his friend seemed to be in a reasonable state.

“It wasn’t silly drinking,” he said. “We’d been drinking pints of Guinness.

“His condition was fine when I last saw him.”

The solicitor was seen by a number of witnesses as he walked towards Y Felinheli, including Keith Dorrington, the ambulance driver who would be dispatched to the scene of Mr Tudur’s death.

Mr Dorrington explained how he’d seen the 27-year-old urinating on a grass verge near the Griffiths Crossing roundabout, less than a mile from where his body was later found.

At around 3am on the Sunday morning, Mr Dorrington was called out to a reported collision.

He said: “We were alerted to an incident on the Y Felinheli bypass. A male had been struck by a car.

“The male appeared to be deceased and they were requesting an ambulance to attend.”

When paramedics arrived at the scene, they could find no signs of life and Mr Dorrington realised Mr Tudur was the same man he’d seen on the grass verge.

He said: “He was lying in a drainage channel up against the crash barrier on the left.

“The clothes did appear to match what we’d seen earlier that evening.”

Taxi driver Terry Moxon told the inquest how he had been driving from Bangor to Caernarfon with two passengers Harold Dickinson and Xantha Joseph when he struck Mr Tudur.

“It was very dark,” he said. “We came over the bypass and all of a sudden there was a big bang and my window had smashed.

“I knew from the shape in the window that it was a person.”

Mr Moxon said he didn’t see anyone in the road before the collision and Mr Dickinson and Miss Joseph, who was injured during the incident, told the inquest that they saw nothing before the impact.

Accident investigator Gordon Saynor said tests showed that the condition of the road surface was good, that the weather was clear and that Mr Moxon’s Skoda had no mechanical faults.

He said the taxi had not left the road and that it was apparent Mr Tudur had walked into the path of the vehicle.

He said: “There’s no evidence to suggest that Mr Moxon was speeding or driving unsuitably or unreasonably.

“It’s reasonable to believe that there was not enough time to discover and react before he felt and heard the collision, about half a second.”

Recording a verdict of accidental death, coroner Dewi Pritchard Jones gave the cause of death as multiple injuries due to a road traffic collision.