Father’s last words to dying son: They are going to fix you
Parents urge US diplomat’s wife to ‘do right thing’
‘Face our family and UK justice’
THE father of Harry Dunn has told of the final words he said to his teenage son as he lay fatally injured after being hit by a car.
Tim Dunn, who had reached the scene of the accident when the 19-year- old was still alive, said: ‘I could see broken bones coming out of his arms, but he was talking.
‘I called over and said: “Harry, it’s your dad, they are going to fix you, be calm.”
‘He stopped moaning and calmed then,’ he told US news channel CBS, ‘and a couple of minutes later one of the doctors said they needed to sedate him because he was having trouble breathing.’
Mr Dunn told his son he would be sedated because it was ‘for the best’ and said he would see him in hospital. These were the last words between father and son because Harry never woke up.
It is exactly seven weeks since US citizen Anne Sacoolas allegedly drove on the wrong side of the road outside RAF Croughton in Northamptonshire and collided with Harry’s motorbike.
The 42- year- old, whose husband Jonathan worked as US intelligence official at the base, claimed diplomatic immunity and left the UK.
After flying to the US, Harry’s parents are on a campaign to get her to return. Speaking at a press conference in New York, his mother Charlotte Charles said: ‘She needs to do the right thing and come back and face what she has done. Face our family. Face the UK justice system.’
Mrs Charles added: ‘She needs to set an example to her own children. You can’t run away from something this terrible.
‘CCTV shows that she was driving on the wrong side of the road, then you see Harry’s headlight over the brow of the hill and the next you see is a fireball when his bike went up.’ Mrs Sacoolas’s lawyers released a statement at the weekend describing the death of Harry as a ‘tragic accident’.
They said Mrs Sacoolas wants to meet his family so that she can ‘express her deepest sympathies and apologies’.
But it stopped short of offering to help their quest for justice by returning to the UK.
Mrs Charles said: ‘We feel that statement should have come out right from the beginning, instead of getting on a plane and running home.
‘We’ve heard her statement but we don’t know how sincere it was. Just hearing it from a statement is a little too little too late I’m afraid.
‘To have to go through all this, to get an apology, just in writing, it’s just wrong. We promised Harry when we lost him that night in the hospital that we would make sure justice was done.’ Breaking down in tears, Mrs Charles added: ‘I have a feeling at the pit of my tummy every morning knowing I have lost a child – telling us that something is not right. All of our grief has gone on hold.’
Asked what he would say to US President Donald Trump if he got the chance to meet him, Mr Dunn said: ‘I would say to him as a man, as a father, how could you let this happen. If you are a father and your child died surely you’d want that person to own up and take responsibility for their actions.’
On Saturday, Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab wrote to Harry’s family saying that Mrs Sacoolas no longer had diplomatic immunity from potential prosecution because her husband Jonathan had left his posting at the RAF base.
If Northamptonshire Police submit a file of evidence which meets the US extradition threshold, she could be extradited to face justice here.