‘My teenage son and his friends were killed in a car crash – this simple check could have saved them all’

‘For a few seconds, you almost forget, and then it hits you,’ Crystal Owen says after her teenage son was killed in a horror crash on their way to a camping trip in Snowdonia.

Harvey Owen, who was a passenger, and his three friends, Jevon Hirst, 16, Wilf Fitchett, 17, and Hugo Morris, 18, were all killed when their car overturned and landed in a water-filled ditch in November 2023.

Trapped upside down the partially submerged car took two days to finally be found by a passing refuse lorry driver on his round. With no visible injuries, a coroner ruled that the friends all tragically died from drowning.

She told Metro: ‘You’ll be doing your weekly shopping, and you go down the middle aisle and think, “Harvey loved his Japanese food, I’ll get that for him,” and then it hits you.’ The past t