I accidentally killed my friend and living with the guilt is harrowing

The day Chris Yaw accidentally killed a man will forever haunt him.

It was November 2014, and Yaw, a 61-year-old vicar, was living in his old home in Detroit with his wife and children. One morning, Yaw came outside and saw that Kenny, his friend and gardener, had been trapped by the garage doors, which were made of thick oak, weighing several hundred kilograms. “Kenny had been pinned between these doors, and literally crushed,” remembers Yaw. “I’ll never forget taking his body out of the door. Absolutely horrifying. And it was my fault.”

Some time before Kenny died, the man who installed Yaw’s garage doors had told him that he should install a sensor, to stop someone mistakenly getting caught in them. The cost would be $6k (£4.7k), because there’d have to be some complicated digging into the ground. “I felt like that was a lot,” says Yaw, “and I decided not to do it. I thought ‘it’s not a big deal’ and I signed a document saying that I know that it’s a hazard and that I’m willing to take the risk. I did this, of course, never ever thinking anything would happen. Well, lo and behold – it happened.” Kenny had been going into the garage to fetch a rake to clear leaves when he was killed.