How can you tell a child that someone tried to kill him? All our lives are in ruins

Parents’ heartbreak statement

THE act committed by this individual against our son is unspeakable.

Words cannot express the horror and the fear that his actions have brought upon us and our son. How can one explain to a child that someone deliberately tried to kill him?

How can he now ever trust mankind? How can he not see in every stranger a potential ‘villain’ who could cause him immense pain and suffering? Months of pain, fear and physiotherapy, hours and days spent without talking, without moving and without eating, away from his home, away from his friends and away from his family...

Questions about his future and his health remain unanswered, as well as these questions: ‘Will I be able to walk again?’, ‘When are we going home?’, ‘Will I go back to school, see my friends again?’

What has our life become since the attempted murder of our sixyear-old son? After going through the fear of losing him, and being unable to comprehend this gratuitous and senseless act, we are now faced with numerous psychological and material problems. Our life is in ruins. Since the day of the attack, we have not left our son’s side, following him to all the various hospitals where he has been treated. We spend our days in hospital with our son. Either one of us, or his grandmother, spends the night with him in his room on a camp bed or even a chair.

He is still in a wheelchair today, wears splints on his left arm and both of his legs, and spends his days in a corset moulded to his waist, sat in his wheelchair. He is in permanent restraint…

The nights are always extremely difficult, his sleep is very agitated, he is in pain, he wakes up many times and he cries. We have been so scared of losing him that now it is physically impossible for us to be apart from him more than a few hours, and only when we know a family member is with him…

He said to a psychiatric nurse who asked him about it that he would like to ‘slap’ the man who did this to him. We are extremely worried about the future. From what the doctors said, he has many years of physiotherapy ahead of him, and we have no prospects or plans for the future other than being by his side.

Our son is alive. He is fighting. And that’s all that matters to us. What happened on the roof of the Tate Modern that day is unforgivable.