Ex-Yorkshire miner hurled to death in Florida road accident

Martin Slack

A FORMER Yorkshire miner who emigrated to Hawaii to become a police officer and then to Florida has died in a freak accident which saw him catapulted from his van and hurled 50ft into a river.

Pauline Jacques who had been asleep at the time of the smash, awoke to find her husband Les missing and the van they had been travelling in completely wrecked.

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Shocked Mrs Jacques clambered out of the crushed vehicle, searching for the 58-year-old in the dark along a mile-long bridge before emergency services were alerted.

Investigators discovered the couple’s van had been struck by a three and a half tonne asphalt-laying vehicle. The couple, who had been married for 37 years, were returning from a business trip when the tragedy happened.

The former miner had left the UK and joined the Maui police force in Hawaii in 2006 but later left to live in Florida where he set up an security business transporting prisoners.

Mr Jacques and his 58-year-old wife were driving back to their Florida home in the early hours. She awoke in the debris to find her husband gone and a passer by dragged her from the wreckage.

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Mrs Jacques searched for her husband in the darkness for six hours, at first unaware she was on a bridge a mile long.

The van had been side-swiped by the massive truck and its running board had cut through the vehicle. As day broke helicopters and boats mounted a search and found Mr Jacques’s body.

He had only volunteered to make the business trip at the last minute as a favour to a colleague, with his wife accompanying him as she often did.

The couple were originally from Wombwell, Barnsley, and Mr Jacques was a miner at Wombwell and Darfield collieries. He also had a short spell as a police officer in the UK.

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They owned a shop in Wombwell and Mr Jacques was well known in the area where he ran seaside trips for pensioners as well as sponsoring local football teams. He was a keen scuba diver and ran his own karate school in the area.

His body will be cremated in Florida and the ashes returned to the UK for a further service in his home town on a date yet to be set

Mr and Mrs Jacques’s youngest son, Ashley, returned from service in Iraq with the US Marine Corps only a few weeks before his father’s death.

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