Grieving British mom Charlotte Charles says she will never meet on US soil with the reputed ex-CIA spy who allegedly killed her 19-year-old son in a wrong-way driving accident in England last August — and she’ll continue to fight for extradition and justice.
“People talk of heartache, but they have absolutely no idea until it happens to you,” a teary Charles told The Post in an emotional interview in Manhattan Friday.
“My heart breaks into more pieces than you can ever explain to anybody.”
Charles and her husband Bruce came to New York to plead for justice for her son, Harry, who was riding a motorcycle near a US military base in central England when he was allegedly struck and killed by an SUV driven by Anne Sacoolas.
Since then, Sacoolas, 42, the wife of a UK-based diplomat and herself a mother of three, has claimed diplomatic immunity, escaping prosecution by fleeing back to the US.
The State Department is refusing to grant the UK’s extradition request. On Sunday, the British media reported that Sacoolas is herself a former CIA spy.
“We don’t feel she should have been able to come back to the US and carry on with her life as if my boy didn’t matter,” Charles said.
“It doesn’t matter to me who she is, or what she works as,” Charles added of the news that Sacoolas had been a spy.
“At the end of the day, unintentionally or not, there was a crash that could have been avoided if she was on the correct side of the road in the UK. She wasn’t.
“She drove for quite a long distance on the wrong side of the road and killed my boy. She needs to pay for justice. Diplomatic immunity or not, it does not cover it,” Charles said.
Given the State Department’s refusals, she believes she’ll likely have to wait until President Trump is no longer in office to ever see Sacoolas brought back to the UK to face justice, Charles said.
“If he stays in the presidency again, which we think he will, we’ll just keep fighting,” she said.
Charles said she is still angry that she was summoned to Washington last month for what she’d been led to believe would be a private meeting with US officials — only to learn that Sacoolas was in the next room, and that the press was waiting for them, too.
Charles said she had no intention — then or now — of meeting Sacoolas in the US.
“If we were to meet her, it would need to be on UK soil and with the appropriate people around us, with warning, so that both sides can have that preparation — but to be sprung on us like that, that’s not right,” she said.
“I promised my son that night that we would get justice,” she said of night he died. “I had no idea how hard it would be.”