THE BRAVEST WALK OF ALL
Bradley, 14, was bullied so badly at school he took his own life — and his sister found him. Here, the family tell of their anger and grief, before returning to the scene yesterday to demand the headmaster’s resignation in . . .
THE message was stark, uncompromising, utterly horrific and came without warning or preamble. Byron John took a phone call from his children’s school last week that has destroyed the close-knit contentment of his family life.
‘The head teacher said my 14-year-old son Bradley had attempted to take his own life and that paramedics were trying to save him,’ he says, still reeling from the directness with which the news was delivered.
‘I drove to the school so fast, running every red light, overtaking cars in the path of oncoming traffic. At that point I didn’t know if Bradley was alive or conscious. At the school there was an air-ambulance, emergency vehicles everywhere, police. I abandoned my car on a traffic island and ran in.
‘ The police said a medical team including two consultants were working on Bradley, and I was screaming: “Please let me see him!” But they said I couldn’t, that they were doing their very best for him. So, reluctantly, my partner Kate and I waited in a classroom.
‘Two teachers held our hands — they were kind and supportive. Then a paramedic came in and said: “It’s not looking good,” but they’d keep on trying and would move Bradley to Morriston Hospital, Swansea.
‘Then a trolley came past us and Bradley was on it, with a machine performing cardiopulmonary resuscitation and various lines attached to him.
‘I looked at his face and I knew he was dead. I could see that it was just hopeless.’
Byron is a tall man, imposing of girth and stature, but at this point his face crumples and he sobs. Then he takes a deep breath and steels himself to continue.
‘I suspect they realised at the hospital there was no possibility of bringing him back because we were taken to the bereavement room. There were about 30 professionals, every kind of specialist, working on him and they tried everything. They worked for an hour-and-a-half and I’d like to heap praise on them because they did everything they could.’ Again he pauses, sobs. ‘They gave the time of his death as 1.36pm. Since then, every emotion has run through me — grief, anger, disbelief — and it is hell.’
In the sitting room of the family’s farm house near Ammanford, South Wales, all around is evidence of the boy they adored: trophies for showjumping; photos of him on his hunting horse Pepsi; rosettes from boyhood gymkhanas.
An inquest, opened and adjourned this week, has yet to record a verdict on Bradley’s death, but the facts as they stand are harrowing.
The caring, charismatic teenager, a gifted equestrian who was the centre of his loving family’s world, hanged himself in a lavatory at St John Lloyd Catholic Comprehensive School in Llanelli last Wednesday.
How on earth could a pupil, in a place of safety, have escaped the jurisdiction of staff for long enough to have taken his life? What could have driven him to such despair? These are the questions that plague his distraught family.
Horrifically, it was Bradley’s sister Danielle, 13, a fellow pupil at the school, who found him.
‘He had tied a belt round his neck and she had tried to unhook him, to get him down, but he was too heavy,’ says Byron. ‘He was cold and blue. She tried to save him but she couldn’t.’
It is hard to imagine the trauma that Danielle is enduring. Yesterday, she bravely returned to school, walking hand-in-hand with her parents, as a crowd outside cheered their support. Byron hand- delivered a letter to the school’s head, Ashley Howells, demanding his resignation.
‘I’m very unhappy at the way the school has handled things, both before Bradley died, on the day it happened and since,’ he says. ‘ There was a systematic failure of any workable antibullying policy.
‘There was a failure to follow up our concerns and those of the healthcare professionals helping my son. I am asking for the head’s resignation along with other teachers who let Bradley down.’
He added that the school had issued ‘misleading’ statements claiming that support had been provided for Danielle, when in fact, Byron says, nobody had even called to see how she was.
The siblings were ‘so close they could read each other’s minds’, says Kate. ‘They both knew what the other was thinking. They were a unit; like twins.’
Byron says his son was driven to desperation by bullies who harried, goaded and intimidated him because he was ‘different’.
Bradley had attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), which accounted for his restless, boisterous energy and occasional bouts of frustration. It set him apart from his peers and made him an easy target for tormentors.
‘His condition made him reactive and sensitive,’ his father explains. ‘If someone hit or pushed him, he wouldn’t walk away, as I advised him to do, he’d have to understand why they’d done it. He wanted an answer.’
And Bradley’s passion for riding also distinguished him from his fellow pupils: he was a talented showjumper and huntsman, and with Kate and his father had founded the Three Counties Bloodhounds, a humane hunt which follows the scent of a human runner.
Kate and Byron are Hunt Masters, and after Bradley died they posthumously awarded him the title Master of the Hounds, an honour that will be inscribed on a plaque on his coffin.
He had an Xbox and PlayStation but he didn’t bother with them,’ recalls Byron. ‘He just loved to be outside: in the kennel with the hounds, riding his horses.
‘He had a great talent for the mechanical and practical. He built a treehouse, fixed the roof on the boiler room, put up guttering, changed the water pump on the Jeep. And everywhere I went, he was with me.’
Byron’S
eyes brim with tears. ‘ Bradley loved everyone and all he wanted everyone and anyone to do was to love him back,’ adds his stepmum Kate.
‘He was demonstrative, affectionate, and he loved the closeness of his family.
‘He was very protective of all of us and he accepted me from the start. I never once heard him say: “you can’t tell me what to do.
You’re not my mum.” ’ All these qualities made him an atypical teenager — and an obvious target.
From the age of 12 — then a pupil at Amman Valley Comprehensive School, Carmarthenshire — Byron and Kate say he became the butt of bullies on the school bus.
‘They spat at him, poured drinks over him and stuck chewing gum in his hair,’ recalls Byron. ‘once he came home covered in blood from a broken nose.
‘Just before Easter 2016, he failed to turn up at the bus stop to come home. I rang him and he was sobbing, begging not to go back to school. He was distraught.’
Byron and Kate, who were awarded residency of Bradley and Danielle seven years ago following Byron’s divorce, contacted the local education authority and begged them to move Bradley.
He and Danielle duly started at St John Lloyd shortly before the summer break two years ago.
‘The class teacher who took Bradley under her wing was strict but fair, and he responded well to her,’ recalls Byron. ‘But soon incidents started on the school bus again.
‘He was smacked in the face, his school bag was ripped and emptied on the floor and one day his mobile phone went missing.
‘ Danielle witnessed these incidents and reported them to the school, but neither of the children told us because they didn’t want us to be worried.’
Sharply conscious that pupils are vulnerable when outside the school’s authority, Byron, 53, is now calling for school buses to be fitted with CCTV cameras. ‘ no other child should go through the torture Bradley endured,’ he says.
The bullying of his son continued. ‘His food was spat in, his trousers and underwear pulled down in PE,’ says his dad.
‘We attended the school and were assured matters had been sorted out. Then, just before Christmas 2017, his treasured iPhone was bent like a banana.
‘We told the school that the boy responsible should pay for the damage or we would go to the police.’ Duly the money was paid. ( It was typical of Bradley’s generosity that he donated some of it to a pupil who’d lost his home in a fire.)
Mindful of Bradley’s unhappiness, Byron and Kate, 29, arranged for him to take up a place at an equine college in Carmarthen, but he decided to ‘stick it out’ at St John Lloyd until half term.
‘Twice he said he was counting the days until he left school. He couldn’t wait,’ recalls his dad.
However, in the days before his death there was no intimation — not the slightest clue — that Bradley intended to take his own life.
The family drove home from a showjumping event at Chepstow a fortnight ago and Byron reminded his son that in two weeks he’d be going back to participate in a more advanced event.
‘It would have been this weekend,’ he says. ‘He was looking forward to it. He talked my ears off all the way home he was so excited.’
At school last Monday the day had passed uneventfully and in the evening the family had visited Byron’s mother, June, 76.
‘She’d bought Bradley some new school uniform. They enjoyed the usual banter about her getting a size too big. Bradley loved spending time with his grandmother and he’d help her with odd jobs.’
Tuesday, too, was a happy day. Byron had driven the children to school (he tried to do this now and again to avoid the trauma of the school bus), and that day Kate’s sister, Sharon, and her partner had visited. ‘ The children were determined to get Sharon on a horse. There was lots of
laughter.’ The following day — the day Bradley died — nothing seemed amiss. Byron drove the children down the farm track to meet the school bus. ‘Bradley got out of the Jeep and said: “See you later,” and then he added: “Don’t forget the petrol for the quad bike.” Those were the last words he said to me.’
Thereafter, Byron has a minute-byminute record of how an ordinary day turned to one of tragedy.
‘At 11.30am I suggested to Kate that we pop into a nice cafe nearby for a bite to eat, and at 11.54am a text came through from Danielle: “Bradley has skipped science.”
‘She’d heard a message on the school Tannoy calling him. She knew it was strange that he was almost an hour late for one of his favourite lessons and it alarmed her, so she’d left her class to text me.
‘Then she went straight to the toilets where she knew Bradley would go if he had a problem because it was his “safe place”. She tried to phone him and could hear his phone vibrating from the other side of the cubicle door.
‘Meanwhile I was trying to ring Dani, but her phone was going to voicemail, which I think meant she was trying to ring me. So I rang the school. On the third attempt they answered.
‘I asked if they’d found Bradley and there was no sense of alarm. They said they’d look. Dani had by now run screaming for help and two staff members went with her to the toilets. They unlocked the cubicle door.
‘Dani went to explain to her class teacher that she was checking to see if Bradley was OK. When she got back the staff were still standing outside the cubicle and it was Dani who pushed open the door.
‘ She struggled with it because Bradley was hanging there. And that’s how she found him . . .’ He breaks off, devastated.
ACCORDING to Byron, the electronic register that recorded pupils’ arrival for the science lesson should have been taken at 11.05am. Had a student failed to turn up within 12 minutes of the start of the lesson, they should then have been called over the school’s public address system.
But it seems that what could have been a vital summons was delayed. Danielle did not hear the first call for her brother until 11.53am. A minute later Byron received the text from her alerting him to his son’s absence, after which he called the school.
Paramedics were summoned at 12.02pm and they arrived swiftly, within five minutes. For the next hour they tried fruitlessly to revive Bradley. His father and Kate arrived at the school at 12.20pm.
Could prompter action have saved Bradley’s life? This will doubtless be the subject of later enquiries. Meanwhile, his heartbroken family can only hope that from the wreckage of their lives some good is salvaged.
‘There are two messages, really,’ says Kate, who is a softly- spoken, measured young woman from whom kindness radiates. ‘ Schools have to take firm measures against bullying, and there must also be greater understanding of children with ADHD. They are sensitive. They take everything to heart. They are easily targeted and so vulnerable to bullies.’
Meanwhile, Councillor Glynog Davies, executive board member for education and children at Carmarthenshire County Council, declined to speculate as a formal investigation is under way, but extended his ‘sincere sympathies’ to the family. Gareth Morgans, the council’s director of education and children’s services, acknowledged the ‘ professional and compassionate contribution of the head teacher and his staff at this difficult time’.
Byron John, however, feels parlously let down. But it is extraordinary that even as the family struggles to climb from the pit of despair, they have time to spare for others. Byron and Kate insist on driving me the 13 miles from their home to Swansea station.
As I leave, he tells me: ‘I keep thinking we’re in a dream, and that I’ll wake up and tell Bradley: “You’re not going to school today.” Then he’ll ask: “When am I going back?” And I’ll tell him: “Never.” ’