The father of a teenager critically injured in a car crash that killed her friend has described her return home as “like winning the lottery”.

Gerry Pierce said he could not believe how well Hayley, 18, had recovered from the crash, which left her unconscious for weeks.

Hayley was the passenger in friend James Thetford’s BMW when it crashed into railings on the A259 at Albion Street in Southwick, at 2.34am on March 5. James, 21, died from his injuries.

Hayley left the Princess Royal Hospital in Haywards Heath on Friday and returned to her family home in Worthing.

Builder Mr Pierce, 45, said: “She had a severe head injury. Her chance of recovery was 100 to one against her.

“For her to be up and walking the week after was 1,000 to one. For her to be out of hospital after a month is like winning the lottery. Everyone said she’s a miracle.”

Describing his family’s ordeal, the father of two said: “My wife rang me up. She said the police were at the house and Hayley had been in an accident.”

Mr Pierce drove to the Royal Sussex County Hospital in Brighton, where his wife Karen was waiting for him, before seeing their eldest daughter hooked up to machines in the intensive care unit.

“All I wanted to do was pick her up and give her a cuddle, but I couldn’t because of all the tubes.”

A week after the accident Hayley was transferred to the specialist unit in Hurstwood Park Neurological Hospital in Haywards Heath.

After getting back on her feet last week she was transferred to the nearby Princess Royal.

Mr Pierce said: “My cousin’s a top neurosurgeon and he told us to prepare for the worst.

“At one stage I was sat down with the doctor and he told me that there was a possibility she was not going to make it and if she did she was not going to have the same quality of life. I said, ‘I can’t tell my wife that’.

“That was on the Saturday morning and that evening she came round.”

It will be several months before she is well enough to return to her work at Diamond Cut hairdressers in Goring Road, Worthing, or her studies at Chichester College.

But her father said: “After everything she’s the same bubbly girl she used to be.”