Just after midnight on Sunday, Sandy Sandhu pulled his car over to the emergency lane of the North-South Motorway at Dry Creek, about 12 kilometres north of the Adelaide CBD, to jump-start a vehicle. He would never leave that roadside alive.
Sandhu, 33, also known as Sarabdial Singh, suffered catastrophic injuries when a ute allegedly slammed into him at speed. His brother Sikandar Singh was standing beside him when it happened. According to 7News, witnesses told police the ute had been
"swerving"across multiple lanes before the impact. Sandhu was rushed to hospital but died from his injuries, leaving behind a wife and two young children.
Police allege the driver, 22-year-old Harrison Beckel of Mallala, was intoxicated at the time and fled the scene after the collision. At the Elizabeth Magistrates Court on Monday, prosecutors described the grim aftermath: a passing witness stopped, got out of their vehicle, and found a leg on the road before hearing Sandhu calling out from nearby. Beckel has been charged with causing death by dangerous driving and leaving the scene of a crash. He is yet to enter pleas and is due to return to court in June. The Sydney Morning Herald has also reported that a man was charged with murder in connection with a death in Adelaide around the same time, though the specific charge details in each outlet differ and readers should follow court proceedings as they develop.
What has inflamed Sandhu's family as much as his death is what came next. Beckel spent just one night in custody before being granted bail, and was permitted to return to work and to continue driving trucks on his family's Mallala farm while the case proceeds. For a family still processing unimaginable loss, the contrast is stark. "We are still trying to figure out how the hell he got bail and we got a life sentence," Sandhu's brother Harman Singh told 7News.
His widow, Parabhjit Kaur, was equally direct. "I lost my husband. My kids lost their father," she said. "He was the best part of my life." Sikandar Singh, who was present when his brother was struck, recalled Sandy's final words: a plea to take care of his children and his family.
The bail decision sits at the centre of a genuine legal tension. Courts in South Australia are required to grant bail unless there are specific grounds to refuse it, and a person who has not yet entered a plea retains the presumption of innocence. Defence lawyers and civil liberties advocates would rightly point out that pre-conviction detention should be the exception, not the default, even in serious matters. The South Australian Law Handbook outlines the structured legal framework that governs these decisions, and magistrates operate within it.
But the community response to cases like this one reflects a legitimate frustration: when someone allegedly kills another person through reckless conduct and then flees the scene, the standard bail calculus can feel wildly disconnected from the gravity of what has occurred. South Australia's own road safety data shows that drink driving accounts for roughly 18 per cent of driver fatalities in the state each year, a figure that has barely shifted despite decades of public campaigns and escalating penalties.
There is also the question of conditions attached to bail. Allowing a person charged with a fatal road offence to continue driving on a family farm is, at minimum, a detail that courts and prosecutors may wish to scrutinise more carefully in future hearings. Sikandar Singh said he was standing no more than two feet from the car when the ute hit, a detail that raises obvious questions about the driver's awareness of the emergency lane ahead.
A GoFundMe campaign established to support the Sandhu family had raised more than $43,000 by the time this article was published, a sign of the public sympathy generated by the case.
The facts here are not yet fully established in court, and Beckel retains the presumption of innocence until a verdict is reached. But for Sandhu's family, the legal process offers little immediate comfort. "One day I will get justice," Parabhjit Kaur said. That day, given the pace of Australian courts, remains some distance away.