A DRUNK-DRIVER died after crashing his car nearly three times over the limit.

Rui Manual Da Silva Simoes, 38, didn’t have his seatbelt on when his Toyota Corolla drifted onto the wrong side of the A420 and crashed into another car in the early hours of December 19.

Mr Simoes, who was an engineer and lived in Brize Norton, had been at a work’s Christmas party the night before and stayed out with a colleague who last saw him on the dancefloor at 2.30am.

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He had told his workmate that he had driven into Oxford but planned on getting a taxi or bus home and collecting his car the next day.

At his inquest on Wednesday, statements were read out from paramedics who tried to save his life, the other driver in the crash who has had six operations, and a witness who heard the ‘huge bang’ and saw ‘debris flying everywhere’.

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Inquest at Oxford Coroners Court

The head coroner for the county, Darren Salter, told his family – who were at the inquest with a translator – that there was nothing the other driver could have done to stop the incident.

Colin Willis, who was driving his work Vauxhall Corsa at the time, only remembers approaching The Greyhound pub and ‘thinking how nice it looked’ before waking up with paramedics and firefighters trying to get him out of the car.

In his statement he said the next thing he remembers is waking up at the John Radcliffe, where he still was in January.

Another driver, in a Skoda, who was on his way to work that morning described the driving conditions as ‘horrendous’ because it was so foggy.

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He added: “I was driving on a carriageway when suddenly a car came hurtling past me, it was a Vauxhall Corsa and I thought ‘why on earth is he driving like that in these conditions’.

“When I got round the bend, I saw lights coming towards me and a vehicle from the opposite direction. I was still driving at about 40-50mph and I remember thinking about an accident I had years ago and thinking ‘here we go again I have no where to go’.

“I am 99 per cent sure the Corsa didn’t break and there was a huge bang and the cars collided. Everything happened so quickly there was debris flying everywhere. I drove through the middle of them over the debris.”

Catherine Alder, a paramedic at South Central Ambulance Service, said she had been dispatched at about 4.49am and arrived at the scene at 5.06am.

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Police officers and firefighters were already there, one holding Mr Simoes head in his car to open his airways.

She said here as a ‘huge amount’ of damage to the vehicle which meant he was trapped inside.

At 5.35am he went into cardiac arrest and was finally released from the car three minutes later.

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Paramedics started CPR immediately and they arrived at the John Radcliffe Hospital at 6.08am but he was pronounced dead shortly after.

A post-mortem exam revealed that he had 218mcg of alcohol per 1l of blood, above the legal limit of 80mcg.

After his death his family flagged a recall notice about the car’s airbags but the collision investigator PC Hill said it wasn’t likely that the airbags caused the crash.

Mr Salter said he died from multiple injuries but gave a verdict as a road traffic collision.