A van driver killed a road worker because he was allegedly checking the eBay app on his smartphone while doing 55 mph on a dual carriageway.
Anthony Tompkins was on a delivery trip when his white van veered into a party of highways workers who were mending pot holes on the North Devon link road.
Road worker Steven Tolley, aged 48, suffered fatal head injuries when he was hit by the wing mirror of the Iveco van as he wheeled a barrow load of tar inside a protective lane of cones.
Tompkins had been seen driving erratically in the minutes before the accident at Gornhay Cross, Tiverton, in January 2013, and checks on his phone showed he may have been using the internet at the time.
He is a self employed delivery driver from Saltash, East Cornwall, but also runs his own business buying and selling furniture of the internet auction site eBay.
He accessed the eBay app on his Samsung Galaxy mobile phone for six minutes at the time of the fatal crash, Exeter Crown Court was told.
Mr Tolley, from Tiverton, was one of a team from South West Highways who were carrying out urgent repairs to the outside lane of the North bound carriageway of the A361 after drivers had complained of dangerous potholes the previous day.
He was thrown into the air by the force of the impact and suffered head injuries when he hit a 'hot box' in which tarmac was heated. He died six days later in Derriford Hospital, Plymouth.
Tompkins, aged 45, of Trehurst Farm, Saltash, denies causing death by dangerous driving. He says he was suffering from a condition called sleep apnoea which caused him to have a 'mini-sleep' at the time of the crash.
Mr Richard Posner, prosecuting, said Tompkins drove around 1,500 miles a week and was on his way to North Devon from an antiques shop near Exeter Airport when the accident happened at around 11 am.
He said a driver who was behind him on the dual carriageway saw his van swerving between lanes just before the accident scene.
Other members of the road mending crew suffered less serious injuries after jumping out of the way of the van which swung into the coned-off area and hit a device called a whacker plate and Mr Tolley's wheelbarrow.
Mr Posner told the jury they would have to decide whether Tompkins' erratic driving was the result of him blacking out, as he claims, or because he was distracted by his use of the internet on his phone.
He said a police IT expert had set up an identical Galaxy Mobile with the same eBay app and found it was not possible for it to be activated unwittingly.
He said Tompkins used his phone four times in the half hour before the accident, culminating in a six minute internet access starting at 10.52 am when he accessed the eBay app.
He said:"There is evidence he was using his mobile phone to access the internet while he was driving. He supplemented his income as a driver by buying and selling furniture on eBay and had an internet account to do that.
"The prosecution say his driving was erratic and the jury are going to have to decide why he was driving that way. The forensic examination of his mobile phone provides compelling evidence to answer the question of what caused him to lose concentration.
"The evidence will establish that when he was driving along the road the eBay app was launched and launched manually. The jury are going to have to analyse that carefully.
"The prosecution say if he did so at the time he was seen driving erratically that was dangerous. He was not concentrating on the road as he approached the scene of the collision.
"There is compelling evidence that he accessed eBay, a site which he visits to buy furniture, and as a consequence of his behaviour he caused the death of Mr Tolley. That is the irresistible conclusion we invite the jury to reach."
