A DRUG driving lorry driver who crashed into a school bus and left two pupils with life-changing injuries has been jailed for three years.

Thomas Richard Abbott, 26, fell asleep at the wheel of an HGV after driving for eight hours with cocaine, cannabis and amphetamine in his body, said Stephen Welsh, prosecuting.

The lorry drifted across the A162 at Monk Fryston near Selby, and collided with the parked bus.

A 14-year-old boy who was stepping off the bus as the lorry hit and a 14-year-old girl in the bus doorway were both badly injured with lifelong consequences. The boy suffered a shattered leg, broken clavicle, fractured base of his skull and a brain injury.

York Crown Court heard he can no longer play the football he loves and may not fulfil his dream of a life in the Army.

“I feel my life now is on hold,” he wrote in a personal statement.

The girl broke an ankle and hip and is permanently scarred.

“I am angry I have to deal with this for the rest of my life and there is no ending,” she told the court.

Both said their education had suffered.

Judge Peter Kelson QC told Abbott: “No sentence I can impose upon you today can come close to helping or compensating them for the terrible injuries they have suffered.

“It was one dreadful piece of dangerous driving. You were driving an HGV, a lethal weapon.”

Abbott had the chance to stop when he had drifted across the carriageway shortly before the crash, but had not done so.

Abbott, of Limes Avenue, Staincross, Barnsley, pleaded guilty to two charges of causing serious injury by dangerous driving on December 10 and one of drug driving, and was jailed for three years.

He was also banned from driving for six and a half years and ordered to take an extended driving test.

He told police he had taken the drugs two days before the crash.

For him, James Fox-McGowan said he was remorseful and hard-working. He had not had problems in the eight hours driving up to the crash.

He had only taken the temporary lorry contract because a clerical error delayed his chance to join the Royal Navy until January 2019.