A PROFESSIONAL driver whose articulated lorry jack-knifed and killed a rock drummer has been spared a jail sentence.

Jamie Airns was driving his Citroen C3 home from a night shift at about 6.45am on June 15 last year, when it was hit by a trailer spinning across the road from a lorry travelling in the opposite direction near Copcut Elm roundabout, Droitwich.

Lorry driver Bernard Doe was travelling above the speed limit, Worcester Crown Court heard.

He braked too hard and lost control of the trailer on a wet surface. It hit the offside of the Citroen, knocking it back along the road and into a metal pole.

Hospital staff initially thought Mr Airns would survive his multiple in-juries but he died on July 1 from complications.

A heavy metal drummer with county bands Choir Boys, Black Out, Wreckage, Medulla Nocte, Murder One and Anger Man-agement, the 46-year-old of St George’s Close, Eve-sham, had played at Do-wnload and had once been a roadie with Thin Lizzy.

Paul Whitfield, prosecuting, told Worcester Crown Court that 61-year-old Doe, of Waterloo St-reet, Cheltenham, was driving back from a delivery in Oxford. He was an agency driver on his way back to Yodel on Berry Hill industrial estate in Droitwich, where Mr Airns worked. They had kn-own each other as work colleagues.

The road was wet and the tachograph showed Doe was travelling at up to 15mph above the 40-mph restricted speed limit for HGVs, Mr Whitfield said.

He read a victim impact statement from Mr Airns' partner Debbie O’Connor, which said she had been to her brother’s funeral in Essex and had just re-turned on the day the crash happened. She visited Mr Airns in hospital and said he was conscious and joking with the nursing staff but he did not recover due to internal complications.

“I felt like part of me is gone,” her statement said.

“I am heartbroken. We adored each other. I have never known anyone like him.”

Peter Fortune, defending Doe, said: “This has haunted him and will haunt him for the rest of his life.”

He said it was “a combination of excess speed, coming up to a bend and on an incline and he had over-braked.”

Doe admitted causing death by careless driving and was banned from driving for 18 months and given a community order with supervision for two years.

He will also have to complete 150 hours unpaid work within 12 months and will be on an electronically tagged curfew for four months be-tween 8pm and 7am.

He was also ordered to pay £600 costs.