A MOTORIST who knocked down and killed a good Samaritan at the scene of an accident is today starting a seven-year prison sentence.

Steven Black, 27, had been involved in a minor collision with a motorbike when Michael Ritson – on a day out with his wife Tracey and their two youngest children – pulled over to help.

The sound engineer, of Jarrow, South Tyneside, stood in front of Black’s Ford Focus when he heard him start the engine.

Black drove into Mr Ritson and the 33-year-old father-of-three died when he fell from the car roof.

His wife and children Rio, 10, and Scarlett, three, were in his car yards away.

Newcastle Crown Court heard his widow felt “overwhelming grief” that “consumed her every waking moment” since the tragedy last March.

Judge John Milford told Black: “This was a case where there was flagrant disregard for the rules of the road and flagrant disregard for the danger being caused to others. You drove your car deliberately at a man who you knew was intent on preventing you from moving.”

Black, of The Riding, Kenton, Newcastle, was initially charged with manslaughter, which carries a maximum sentence of life imprisonment.

But prosecutors accepted his guilty plea to the lesser charge of causing death by dangerous driving. Mr Ritson’s widow Tracey asked the judge to impose the highest sentence possible for the killing of her “husband and best friend”.

Reading a victim impact statement to the court, she said her youngest, Scarlett, missed her Daddy.

She said: “She does not like it when it is light, she prefers the dark. She likes to look at the dark night sky and see her daddy’s face in stars.”

The court was told Black had not intended to leave the scene of the accident, but acted “in shock” when Mr Ritson approached his car.

Jamie Hill QC, mitigating, said Black turned on his engine only to activate his hands-free telephone to call emergency services.

His six-year-old daughter was sitting next to him in the car’s front passenger seat during the accident on the A194 Felling by-pass, Gateshead.

In a recording of the 999 call played to the court, Black was heard to tell the operator: “I have got some idiot trying to get in, he has jumped on my car.”

Mr Hill said the collision was the result of a “tragic misinterpretation” of each other’s intentions and said Black was sorry and was “weighed down by the enormity of what he caused by his actions that day”.

Black was banned from driving for five years.