Dutch footballer Rai Vloet, who now plays for the Russian club Ural Yekaterinburg, has been sentenced this Monday to two and a half years in prison, and four years of loss of driving license, for causing an accident on a highway near Amsterdam that claimed the life of a four-year-old boy.
A court in the Dutch city of Haarlem today found the 27-year-old footballer guilty of causing the accident on November 14, 2021, and, as the defendant admitted in court two weeks ago, he had drunk “two or three glasses of liquor” in a party he’d been to in Amsterdam before getting in the car and driving down the highway.
In addition to two and a half years in prison, Vloet will not be able to drive a car for the next four years because, the judge ruled, it was “a tremendous irresponsibility for him to drive with too much alcohol and so fast: with his actions he has caused an irreversible loss , so that no punishment can alleviate the sorrow and the pain”.
Data from the car of Vloet, who was with another friend when the accident occurred around midnight, shows that he was traveling at 203 kilometers per hour before the accident, on a motorway where the speed limit was 130 km per hour, although the The prosecutor assumed that Vloet was driving at about 120 mph, allowing for a margin of error. The Prosecutor’s Office had requested a sentence of three and a half years in prison for Vloet.
Vloet appeared in court two weeks ago, but today he did not hear his sentence in person as he is currently in Russia, although his lawyer has already conveyed that he “wants to serve his sentence” in the Netherlands. It is not clear if he will appeal the ruling, but once the sentence is final, he will receive an official summons to go to prison.
The footballer was suspended by his then-club Heracles Almelo after the accident, and as “the Netherlands became a bit insufferable” for him, Vloet himself assured, he went to Kazakhstan and now plays football in Russia.
“Our life is paralyzed and you continue as if nothing bad had happened. You are going to play soccer in Kazakhstan and Russia,” the victim’s mother reproached him during a hearing, according to NOS public television. The footballer replied: “I only feel pain, a lot of regret. I have to carry that for the rest of my life.”
Formed in the lower categories of PSV Eindhoven, the Dutch midfielder made his debut with the first team in the 2014/15 season. However, the lack of minutes forced him to pack his bags, without becoming established in any club. Besides the Netherlands and Russia, he has played in Switzerland, Italy, Belgium and Kazakhstan.
