Hit-run tragedy girl’s organs to save 5 children
THE heartbroken family of a girl killed in a suspected hit-and-run revealed yesterday her organs would be used to save the lives of five children.
Melissa Tate, 10, was rushed to hospital after being knocked down near her home at around 6.40pm on Wednesday.
But she died shortly afterwards with her loved ones at her bedside.
An appeal was made by police to trace the driver of a white Renault Kangoo who fled the scene on foot after abandoning the car nearby in Kenton, Newcastle.
Police arrested a 23-yearold man on suspicion of causing death by dangerous driving.
Another man, also 23, was held on suspicion of assisting an offender.
PETER Robinson admits he has a morbid imagination and becomes anxious about some of the most ordinary everyday activities. The best-selling author describes it as a curse, but speaking to him it is clear it’s also in many ways a boon, fuelling his creative energy when he is crafting his award-winning Inspector Banks novels – successfully dramatised by ITV and starring Stephen Tompkinson. “I can become anxious about the simplest of things, imagining what might go wrong,” he admits. “I probably do have a sort of morbid imagination, which is not the greatest thing to have to live with.
“My wife Sheila finds it very annoying. I find travelling very anxious and she loves travelling. She’d rather not have someone constantly worrying.
“But it’s useful when you are working on a story because you can channel those fears and anxieties and get them into the story, make it a little more tense, more suspenseful. It is something you are cursed with, I guess.”
If it is a curse, it is also a blessing. As well as the TV adaptations, his multimillion-selling series, set in the fictional Yorkshire town of Eastvale, has been translated into 19 languages. Its success, in part, is because Robinson is so adept at drawing on real-life events and the zeitgeist for inspiration.
And his new thriller Many Rivers To Cross, the 26th featuring Banks, has been inspired in part by the shocking modern phenomenon of county lines drug dealing. That is the term police use to describe how highly organised gangs use children and young teenagers to transport their deadly narcotics to towns and cities across the country.
IT’S clear Peter was deeply concerned by what he found. “When I was a kid, I started smoking when I was about 13 because my friends were trying it,” he explains. “These days young people are probably doing a lot more dangerous things than smoking and they are working for people who don’t give a fig for human life. They have them in their thrall.
“The county lines phenomenon interested me greatly. I read as much about it as I could, then used my own imagination to figure out how the story unfolds.
“I wanted to know how these children were being recruited, groomed or tempted in on peer pressure.
“It is almost Victorian. It’s easy to get drawn in if you want to be part of a group. You don’t want to feel left out.”
He continues: “Obviously, it’s a fictional story about a kid who is working for one of the county lines who is found dead in a bin. But I was surprised by how young some of the children involved are; how they were recruited, groomed or tempted by peer pressure. It’s deeply worrying.”
Many Rivers To Cross focuses on the effort by Banks and his team to identify a skinny boy of Middle Eastern appearance found dead with stab wounds inside a wheelie bin.
Had he escaped from a war-torn hellhole only to fall into the clutches of evil drug lords using vulnerable teenagers to spread the web of drug supply as far as a small town in Yorkshire?
Or had ruthless Albanian gang bosses used him to tread on the toes of Yorkshire’s born-and-bred criminal underworld? All will become clear to readers.
Peter also revealed his own brushes with criminality which, it turns out, are legion – including some lucky escapes.
“I’ve seen a few things when I grew up in Leeds, a couple of stabbings and razor