VIDEO: Father throws chair at judge after driver gets 120 hours of community service for killing his daughter

A grieving Dutch father threw a chair toward a judge after hearing that the driver who caused a crash that killed his two-year-old daughter and her grandparents had been sentenced to just 120 hours of community service.

The incident took place in a courtroom in Roermond, Netherlands, in November 2014. The driver, a Polish national, had lost control of his vehicle in Meijel on May 19, 2013, and crashed into a bicycle path, killing two-year-old Iza and her grandparents, aged 67 and 64.

Prosecutors argued that the driver had been traveling at up to 120 km/h in an area where the speed limit ranged from 50 to 80 km/h. However, the initial court found there was insufficient evidence that excessive speed had caused the crash and cleared him of manslaughter.

Instead, he was convicted of a lesser offense and sentenced to 120 hours of community service, with 60 days in custody as an alternative.

Iza’s father, Erik Derijks, reacted by grabbing a heavy chair and throwing it toward the judge’s bench before security officers intervened. He later said he had effectively blacked out from grief and anger.

The case did not end there. Prosecutors appealed the sentence, and in September 2015 a higher court concluded that the driver had been driving recklessly and at excessive speed. The court replaced the community service sentence with 15 months in prison and imposed a four-year driving ban.

The driver later fled to the United Kingdom but was arrested and extradited to the Netherlands in August 2016. He eventually served about nine months of his sentence before being granted early release in 2017 so he could return to Poland to be with his girlfriend, who was expecting their child.

He was then released and deported to Poland, bringing another controversial chapter to a case that had already drawn widespread attention in the Netherlands.