The mother of a teen girl involved in a near-fatal car crash at Unanderra has told of the accident's devastating toll, as court proceedings against the 19-year-old man responsible approach a conclusion.
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The 14-year-old girl has not left hospital since the accident of December 6, 2013.
It fell to her mother to tell Judge Paul Conlon how she was faring, during sentencing proceedings against Farmborough Heights man Shaun Primmer at Wollongong District Court Friday.
"She can't talk to us ... she can't smile or laugh ... or show us how she's feeling that day," the woman told the court.
"She has lost her freedom. She will never work, marry or have children - things that she had truly wanted."
The court heard the girl underwent painful daily therapy, and her family would need to move to a new house to accommodate her wheelchair before she could return home.
"I'm very angry at the way [she] is now. I've stopped smiling ... and burst into tears at any time. I have trouble concentrating."
The girl, who cannot be named for legal reasons, was in the front passenger seat of a Ford Falcon sedan being driven by Primmer when it mounted a kerb on Waples Road and slammed into a power pole.
The girl was trapped and unresponsive inside, and was later flown to Westmead Children's Hospital with severe brain trauma, a fractured pelvis, and bruising to her lungs, spleen, pancreas and kidneys.
The towering Primmer - so tall he had to duck to get through the court doorway on Friday - has pleaded guilty to five charges stemming from the crash, including the most serious of dangerous driving occasioning grievous bodily harm.
He had never held a driver's licence and was driving the unregistered, uninsured car at speed while high on methamphetamine shortly before the crash.
Primmer sat with his head down for much of Friday's proceedings, at one point bringing both hands to cover his face.
His solicitor Nerissa Keay called on the court to factor in her client's "significant" intellectual disability, which limited his powers of perception, concentration and thinking generally.
"The consistent findings of the psychologist is he's in the bottom 1 per cent of age-related peers when it comes to those skills," Ms Keay said.
"It is my submission there is a correlation between his intellectual disability and his driving."
Judge Conlon will also consider Primmer's lengthy criminal and traffic record before handing down sentence on Wednesday.