ONE-PUNCH TRAGEDY:
finding purpose after losing both our sons
A ‘coward punch’ on the streets of Sydney killed one of their sons and contributed to the suicide of the other. Now Kathy and Ralph Kelly are creating a lasting legacy of kindness in the wake of the tragic deaths of their children, writes Michael Sheather.
For Sydney’s Kings Cross, it was still early. At precisely 10.05pm on July 7, 2012, Thomas Kelly, a newly appointed trainee accountant, opened the door of a taxi and stepped into a bustling Saturday night on Victoria Street in one of the most notorious and unpredictable entertainment areas in the country.
As Thomas stepped onto the street that night, he was talking into his mobile phone, speaking with a friend who was directing him to the nearby venue where they planned to meet and celebrate a colleague’s birthday. As he spoke, Thomas reached for the hand of a young woman, Shaneez, a fellow cadet with whom he’d struck up a close friendship in recent months while working at a prestigious accounting firm, Hall Chadwick. They were young, obviously attracted to each other and this was their first official outing as a couple. Closed circuit TV footage later showed Thomas laughing and smiling as he held Shaneez’s hand. Romance was clearly in the air.
Unfortunately, that is where both the romance and all the promise of Thomas Kelly’s young life ended, snuffed out in an appalling act of unprovoked violence. Just two minutes later Thomas was laid out on a King’s
Cross pavement, his blood spreading darkly across concrete.
A drunken thug, 18-year-old Kieran Loveridge, lunged at the couple out of the darkness. He punched Thomas in the face – a full-force blow that the young man never saw coming – a senseless coward’s punch that threw Thomas backwards, smashing the back of his skull onto the footpath. He never regained consciousness.
“What happened to my family that night wouldn’t have happened if the person who killed Thomas had made different decisions,” says Kathy Kelly, the 56-year-old mother of Thomas, Stuart and Madeleine Kelly. “But he made a decision that night that he was going out to hurt people. Just a few hours before, he and his mates arrived in the city already heavily intoxicated. They were seen running across the Pyrmont Bridge, rushing up to people, roaring in their faces, trying
to intimidate them as they walked by. That was the beginning of a long night of bad choices and bad behaviour that still has a profound effect, even today, seven years later.
“It’s a horrible ripple effect that ended that night with Thomas’ death but is still having ramifications, not just for me and my husband, Ralph, and our daughter, but for Thomas’ friends, for Stuart, for his friends and even for the family and friends of the killer.”
Kathy and Ralph’s torment was later compounded by a tortuous court process that, to them, seemed biased in favour of the assailant. They steadfastly believed Thomas’ killer should be charged with murder; however, the NSW Director of Public Prosecutions would only charge him with manslaughter, citing a lack of demonstrable intent. As a result, Loveridge received only a maximum six years’ imprisonment for Thomas’ death and a further 18 months for the four other assaults he perpetrated on the same night. Bewilderingly, the trial judge said that Loveridge’s intoxication was a mitigating factor, that the assailant’s decision to punch Thomas was intended but his death was not, and that the incident was at the “low end” of offence even though witnesses heard Loveridge proclaim earlier in the evening: “I swear I’m going to bash someone tonight.”
“We were horrified, absolutely horrified,” says Kathy. “We were shocked, completely cold, unbelieving that the sentence could be so lenient.”
An appeal by the DPP resulted in the Supreme Court doubling Loveridge’s sentence to 14 years with a minimum non-parole period of 10 years. Without parole, he will be in jail until 2026 but he could be on the streets again as soon as 2022.
Thomas’ death precipitated the introduction of the so-called “onepunch” law in NSW, otherwise known as unlawful assault, which today carries a maximum sentence of 20 years.
Kathy, Ralph and their daughter Madeleine, now 23, have borne as much heartache during the past seven years as any family could endure. Not only did they bury Thomas, but the far-reaching tragedy of his violent death left an indelible mark on Thomas’ younger brother, Stuart, who never recovered from the loss of his “best friend”.
What happened next to the Kelly family is the stuff of nightmares. It’s often said that no parent should have to attend the funeral of their child, but the Kellys have had to suffer that experience not once, but twice, when Stuart committed suicide in 2016.
The Kelly family had become the target of unprecedented public vilification for their campaign against Sydney’s late-night drinking culture and the stream of violence that sometimes followed in its wake. As a result, NSW politicians had introduced the infamous
“That is our greatest regret, that we didn’t see the signs.”
“lock-out” laws but the laws remained a source of tension among both the city’s youth and business community, resulting in huge public demonstrations.
Stuart, a shy and sensitive boy very much like his older brother, had been left with deep-seated anguish in the aftermath of Thomas’ death. In 2015, three years after that dreadful night, Stuart gave a public speech to a packed Sydney ballroom in support of the laws, during which he hinted at the turmoil beneath his quiet exterior.
“I carry a deep scar you cannot see,” he said. “It is always there. It sits below the surface of your skin and surfaces when you least expect it.” Just 10 months later, he took his own life.
In the early hours of July 25, 2015, Stuart drove a car to Sydney’s northern beaches. His body was found in the car in the early hours next morning.
Just a few weeks before, he’d moved into St Paul’s, a residential college attached to the University of Sydney. He had remained at the college for just 18 hours, spending one night on campus. His parents say he came home a transformed and broken person.
“We don’t know what happened to Stuart that night,” says Ralph, 59.
“He kept his cards very close to his chest. But as both Kathy and I know, he was a changed person when we picked him up in the car that evening. He got into the car and just sobbed.” Ralph and Kathy believe Stuart was the victim that night of a hazing incident at the university. Stuart’s reputation as the face of the lock-out law campaign singled him out as a target.
“Stuart went from being a successful and popular kid at high school to an insular, guarded young man,” says Ralph. “He told me he didn’t want to go back to university. He said he wanted to study overseas but financially that was impossible for us. Yet at the same time, he was still engaging with the family. He would sit in his room and if he thought Madeleine was getting bogged down in her studies, he’d text her a joke. If he didn’t hear her laughing, he’d sneak into her room and tickle her till she did.”
Even so, there’s no doubt in the Kellys’ minds that it was Thomas’ death and the lock-out law fallout that helped drive Stuart to the brink. “For us, Thomas’ death is linked to Stuart’s suicide,” says Ralph. “It’s clear to us now that Stuart was even more deeply affected than we knew. That is our greatest regret, that we didn’t recognise the signs. And yes, in hindsight, we can say that there were signs, but we simply didn’t see them for what they truly were.”
Seven years ago, the Kellys were a perfectly ordinary Australian family. They lived a comfortable lifestyle afforded by Ralph’s hospitality business. They lived in middle-class comfort and rural tranquility in Burradoo, a small village in the NSW Southern Highlands. “I didn’t work after we married and had children,” recalls Kathy. “The children were all still at school up until six months before Thomas was killed. Thomas and Stuart were at boarding school in Sydney. Our daughter Madeleine was still at school in the highlands.
“The boys would come home either for holidays or weekends and Ralph, who had business in Sydney, would be at home weekends too, and there’d be washing and ironing and all the stuff that comes with children. But there’d also be time spent together around the kitchen table, talking and catching up – just spending time together. That was the thing I loved most, and which I miss most now. That was my life.”
Thomas’ death shattered that idyllic existence. “To then suddenly be thrust into a situation where I had lost a child, and it was a very public situation because the media got behind the notion that justice had not been done for Thomas in the courts. It was extremely difficult to put yourself out there.
But we did because we recognised something in our society that needed to change. Excessive alcohol and violence are a deadly cocktail. We didn’t want what had happened to us to happen to another family, and if there was something we could do to stop that happening, then we were prepared to stand up and do something about it.”
Out of that feeling was born the Thomas Kelly Youth Foundation, a charity organisation that not only lobbies for tighter alcohol regulations but also helps in an even more practical way. The foundation, in conjunction with St John Ambulance and dozens of volunteer workers, has set up multiple help points around the Sydney CBD.
Most busy nights in the Sydney inner city precinct, you can see the white-topped tents decorated with the distinctive light-blue TK signage. It’s here that anyone experiencing medical or physical difficulty or suffering from
too much drink can find first-aid help and counselling.
“Ralph and I have sometimes argued about the foundation,” says Kathy. “I support it – I always have – but at the same time, I feel perhaps we might have just accepted what happened to us and got on with what remained of our lives.
“It is still a very difficult thing to go out in public and speak about our experiences and how it feels. But at the same time, it is cathartic. I was at a stage where I could happily have curled up in a corner and never done another thing. But it’s the foundation and the work we do that gives me purpose, and I am sure that Ralph feels the same way.
“It’s a terrible feeling that you go through when you lose your children, a feeling of powerlessness, of not having the ability to fight back. This is our way of taking back a little control of the situation, of giving back to others who might be in the same situation.”
Kathy says she has regrets. She carries a deep sense of guilt about Stuart, about not noticing signs he was exhibiting, as well as something far sadder. “I was still swept up in the intense grief of Thomas’ death when Stuart died,” she says, tears welling. “I don’t think I experienced the same intense feeling of grief when Stuart died. I was numb from what we’d been through. But it took me a while to realise how I felt and for me to begin that grieving process again. I think perhaps I let him down, but I have tried to make up for that since.”
Even so, the Kellys know they will live the rest of their lives with their experience. “Sometimes, it’s just exhausting,” admits Kathy. “I think Ralph and even Madeleine will tell you the same thing. I look at Madeleine and think: You’re only 23. You have your whole life to live, stretching out in front of you, and with every relationship you form, there will come a time when you will have to explain what happened to your brothers. I know how exhausted that makes me, to do that over and over again. And yet, at the same time, I need to talk about them. I need to keep them alive. I need to keep them alive in my memory.”
Despite that exhaustion, the Kellys are determined to continue being agents of change, and the Thomas Kelly Youth Foundation is about to make a change of its own: it will soon be known as Stay Kind, and will be launched in July.
“There is so much that seems to be wrong with the world,” says Kathy. “But we firmly believe much of it might be fixed if we could all be a little kinder to each other. People like us, people who have suffered tragedy, are usually the ones who start a movement for change – look at the Morcombe family, the Delezios or Turia Pitt. They are the ones who get up and do something to change the world around them. It’s not just about Sydney, not just about Australia. All of us need to be better people. If you had more kindness, you wouldn’t have bullying in schools. You wouldn’t have kids taking their lives because of something another kid writes on social media. If everyone was kind, you wouldn’t have a gunman walking into a mosque and killing people or beheadings on the internet or any of that. “If only we could be kind to each other. I don’t know if we will ever be able to achieve that, but I owe it to my boys – to both Thomas and Stuart – to try to make that happen.”
Too Soon, Too Late, by Ralph and Kathy Kelly, will be published by Unwin and Allen in May, RRP $32.99.
If you or someone you know needs help, contact Lifeline: 13 1114, lifeline.org.au
“This is our way of taking back a little control.”