Mother shares 'forever' grief of losing daughter in crash while driving

Kat Brown's life was forever changed when she lost her "sassy" two-year-old daughter in a crash — while she was driving.

The road safety advocate has opened up about the heartbreaking loss of her daughter, as the latest police statistics show the number of deaths on South Australian roads has already surpassed last year's total.

With two months of the calendar year remaining, 89 people have lost their lives on SA roads, compared with 87 total in 2025.

Ms Brown does not want other families to endure the pain she felt when the life of her "gorgeous little trouble-maker" ended in an instant.

"I have to live with this forever,"

she said.

Ms Brown was driving a ute along North Coast Road, an undulating gravel road which had been freshly graded, toward Point Turton on the Yorke Peninsula, during an Easter long-weekend getaway in 2015.

She was driving under the signposted speed limit with Indie and her then five-year-old son, Taj.

"I knew the conditions were slippery so I took it a lot more carefully then I normally would," she said.

Ms Brown knew the road well, but had never driven it in a ute. As she neared Point Turton, she lost traction at a sweeping bend.

"It fishtailed out from behind me and I attempted to correct … the front passenger tyre met with the soft mound that had accumulated from the grading and the vehicle sunk into that and it flipped us," she said.

"We just slid for what felt like an eternity until a tree brought us to a stop."

Ms Brown was briefly knocked out, but immediately thought of her children as soon as she regained consciousness.

"I just remember calling 'Taj, Indie' … Taj responded but Indie didn't," she said.

'She was my little girl'

With the ute smoking and the doors jammed, Ms Brown's adrenaline surged as she went to pull her children out through a window.

"In that motion and the adrenaline of trying to get us out of the car, I could see that Indie had died instantly," she said.

"I just remember pulling Taj out and trying to protect him from seeing his sister in such a bad way."

Ms Brown said she shared her story for two reasons, firstly to remember her daughter and, secondly, to make others alert to factors outside the "fatal five" driving behaviours which police say are most commonly linked to serious crashes: speeding, intoxication, distraction, dangerous driving or failing to wear a seatbelt.

"Indie lived, she existed, she was dynamite," she said.

"She was a sassy two-year-old who kept her brother in line. She was the apple of her dad's eye. She was my little girl.

"I really push that grief is uncomfortable but we need to talk about that person, because they mean something."

Ms Brown was not charged over the tragic accident.

"I didn't fit the fatal five, I was not distracted, I was not in my phone, I was not speeding, I was not under the influence … and yet somehow something happened and she died," she said.

"I need people to be aware that environment is a factor, an unfamiliar vehicle is a factor and you don't have to be doing anything wrong for something to go terribly wrong.

"Those conditions that caught me out are going to catch other people out."

Road safety 'everyone's responsibility'

In one of his final interviews as SA Police Commissioner, Grant Stevens said more families were sadly likely to grapple with the heartbreak of losing a loved one before the end of the year.

He said any death on our roads was "too many", something he knows acutely well given his "ratbag" son Charlie was fatally injured in a crash on November 17, 2023.

"It just tears you to pieces," he said.

"Life is not the same … we're all different because of this gaping hole in our lives but we've made the choice to remember Charlie, celebrate the time we had with him and we think about him every single day.

"I can't impress upon people too much, just how hard it is to deal with."

Police data shows that 15 people who died on SA roads this year were aged between 40 and 49, which the former police commissioner, who will be sworn in as SA's new governor in December, attributed the rise to complacency.

"You're probably not paying as much attention as you would have as a younger driver when you are more acutely aware of your surroundings," he said.

"No-one drives out of their driveway in the morning expecting to become involved in a serious injury collision or a fatality collision, so you've got to be tuned in.