A coroner has asked New Zealand music festivals to treat tiredness as seriously as they treat alcohol and drugs, after finding that the death of an 18-year-old Rotorua woman driving home from Rhythm & Vines was preventable.
Jade Richards died on New Year’s Day 2024 on State Highway 30 near Ruato Bay, about 20 kilometres short of her Rotorua home. She had spent four nights camping at the festival at Waiohika Estate outside Gisborne. She was asleep in the back seat when the car drifted out of its lane, hit a rock wall and flipped. The driver and the front seat passenger, both friends her own age, got out with minor injuries. Richards died at the scene.
Coroner Louella Dunn released her findings this week. As reported by the Rotorua Daily Post, Dunn found the driver’s lack of response in the seconds before the crash had “all the hallmarks” of someone who was fatigued, and that it was her fatigued state that took the car off the road.
The sleep figures come from the criminal trial. Judge John Bergseng found the driver had somewhere between 22 and a half hours and 25 hours of sleep across the four nights of the festival, which works out at a little over five and a half to just over six hours a night. That is not extraordinary for a young person at a summer festival, and the coroner said as much. What she found alarming was what happens next.
“This may well be normal at a four-day music festival for younger people, however the alarming factor is that the majority of the festival attendees leave the festival either driving or being driven,” Dunn wrote.
Her point is a simple one about the shape of a festival weekend. Tens of thousands of mostly young people drive long distances to a paddock, sleep badly in tents for three or four nights, and then all set off home on the same morning, often on rural roads they do not know well. There is no breath test for tiredness and no legal limit to be over. Judge Bergseng made the same observation at trial, noting there is no test that can be administered for tiredness and that it comes down to the individual driver.
Dunn said the conditions of a music festival do not promote restful sleep, and that the decision to drive home is made by young people who are keen to get back and “may not fully appreciate the risk of driving while sleep deprived and fatigued”.
Her recommendation is aimed squarely at the people who run the events. She asked festival promoters and organisers “to not only consider the effects of alcohol and drugs consumption on driving but to also alert festival attendees that driving while fatigued can have dangerous and potentially fatal consequences”. She suggested organisers give people the option of staying another day so they can sleep before driving, and said festival-goers themselves should plan ahead and make sure whoever is nominated to drive is alert.
That is a modest ask by the standards of coronial recommendations. Festivals already run heavy messaging on drink driving and drug use, and most sell campsites. Adding fatigue to the safety briefing and holding the gates open an extra night would not require anything new to be invented.
A Rhythm & Vines spokesperson told the Rotorua Daily Post that the festival’s thoughts remained with the Richards family, and that “safety is a top priority for Rhythm & Vines and we will consider the coroner’s comments and recommendations as part of our standard and ongoing review of festival operations”. The company said last year that the festival grounds had stayed open long after the music finished so people could rest before heading out.
The findings land in an odd year for the festival. In July, organisers announced that this summer’s event, from 28 to 31 December, will be the last one held at Waiohika Estate after 24 years. Chief executive Kieran Spillane said accessibility and Gisborne’s distance from the rest of the country were factors, and that the 2027 event will be somewhere else, at a site yet to be named.
Jade’s father, Mark Richards, welcomed the move when it was announced, saying a new site should be one people can fly to easily or at least be near a decent sized city, so fewer drivers face a long road home tired. His daughter would have turned 21 on 15 July. “It just shouldn’t have been like that. Moving the festival is definitely a move in the right direction for future families so they don’t have to go through this trauma,” he said.
The family had been pushing the fatigue point long before the coroner picked it up. In a statement given to SunLive last year they said three innocent kids left Gisborne after four days of partying, drinking and little sleep, and that fatigue was inevitable.
The criminal case finished in November 2025. The driver, Jasmine Donaldson, defended a charge of careless driving causing death, arguing sunstrike and a fright from an oncoming vehicle, and Judge Bergseng found her guilty. At sentencing in the Rotorua District Court she was discharged without conviction, disqualified from driving for 10 months, ordered to complete a defensive driving course and ordered to pay $10,000 in emotional harm reparation. She has no conviction recorded. The judge described the crash as a mistake made by an 18-year-old driver who had been tired and should not have driven.
Fatigue rarely gets the attention that speed and alcohol do, partly because it is so hard to prove after the fact. Ministry of Transport figures for 2020 to 2022, published by the road safety charity Brake, put fatigue as a factor in 9 percent of fatal crashes and 4 percent of serious injury crashes, and almost nine in ten fatal fatigue crashes happen on the open road. Because there is no roadside test, the real share is almost certainly higher than the recorded one.
Whether festivals act on the recommendation is up to them, since a coroner can only recommend. What the finding does is put a name and a date to something that has been treated as an unavoidable part of the summer calendar. You can see where and when crashes happen on New Zealand roads in our crash map, and how the annual road toll has moved since 1921 in our road toll tool.
Should festivals keep their gates open an extra night so people can sleep before they drive, or is getting home safely purely the driver’s problem? Tell us what you think in the comments below.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job 🙂
Leave a Reply