IT was all over in a matter of two or three seconds.
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That’s how it was for the motorists who witnessed either the events leading up to the fatal car crash in Yarrawonga, or the event itself.
Registered nurse Deanne Ryan was heading home to Wangaratta after visiting her sister in Yarrawonga when the tragedy unfolded before her.
Ms Ryan told a committal hearing for Joshua Michael Smith in Wangaratta Magistrates Court yesterday she was travelling at about 60km/h when Smith’s car sped past on the Murray Valley Highway.
“I don’t know where it came from,” she said.
Ms Ryan told defence barrister Scott Johns that the Commodore must have been “doing at least 100km/h”.
She readily admitted to Mr Johns that the aftermath of all that happened was shocking and distressing.
“I would say the car travelled in the centre of the road,” Ms Ryan said in her statement to police.
Ms Ryan said she had watched Smith’s car overtake another, maybe two, cars before suddenly veering off at a 45-degree angle and into a tree at the side of the road.
Earlier, courier driver James Williams told of how a white Holden Commodore overtook his car and others at high speed.
The last he saw of the car — which he said was continuing to accelerate the further it went — was as a white flash in the distance, but he did not see the car actually crash.
Yarrawonga funeral director Brett Bourchier described hearing the roar of a car for a couple of seconds.
Then he watched a car speed by in no more than one more second.
“It was going that fast,” Mr Bourchier told the court.