A DRIVER who caused a motorcyclist’s death on a rural Dorset road has been spared jail.

David Rose, aged 75, of Woodbury Court, Bere Regis, was sentenced to 100 hours’ unpaid work and disqualified from driving for 12 months after pleading guilty to causing the death of Kirk Parsons last May.

The 27-year-old motorcyclist was killed near the entrance of Bovington Tank Museum after his bike was struck by a camper van driven by Rose.

Judge Harvey Clark QC, sitting at Bournemouth Crown Court, said Mr Parsons’s death had been ‘an exceptionally tragic and distressing case’.

The court heard that Rose’s Peugeot camper van was turning right off Bovington Lane near the entrance to the Tank Museum at Bovington on May 9, 2009.

The court heard Rose failed to see Kirk Parsons’s Honda CBR900 motorcycle travelling in the opposite direction and collided with it.

Prosecutor David Richards told the court witnesses described the van turning slowly and that there was good visibility along the road.

Some witnesses estimated the motorcycle was travelling between 70 and 90mph, but no physical evidence could confirm that.

The court also heard that Mr Parsons, who was a qualified mechanic and a landscape gardener, had hundreds of friends in Bovington, where he had lived for most of his life.

In a statement to the court, his mother, Hazel Barker, said: “Since Kirk’s death life has had a big hole in it for Kirk’s family and friends. I’m just devastated by this tragedy.”

Mitigating, Nigel Mitchell said Mr Rose had an unblemished record before the accident.

“He cannot offer a reason as to why he failed to see Mr Parsons,” he said, adding that the accident had a ‘profound effect’ on Mr Rose.

Mr Mitchell said: “It cannot be ignored that he is, dare I say it, an elderly man who will never forget what has actions that day resulted in.

“He will have to, for a very long time, live with that.”

Also ordering Mr Rose to pay £750 costs, the judge said it was a ‘momentary act of carelessness which had terrible consequences’.

“In my judgement the level of culpability on the part of the defendant was low,” he added.

Following his untimely death, Kirk Parsons’s friends described him as a witty and loveable person who was well-liked in his community.

Kirk’s friend of 21 years, Steve Garlinge, said at the time: “He was the first person I met when I moved from Germany.

“He was witty and funny.”

Another friend, Mark Briggs, said: “Kirk loved his bikes and his cars.

“He used to scramble in his back garden when he was younger and then got a road bike.”