Mother tells of son’s graveyard death
A HEARTBROKEN mother wept yesterday as she relived the moment she found her eight-year-old son dying after a gravestone fell on him.
Stephanie Griffin, 25, told a fatal accident inquiry she thought Ciaran Williamson had gone to play at a nearby swing park with friends.
She added: ‘As Ciaran was leaving he gave us all a kiss and shouted “love you”. He always did that.’
Minutes later, a friend came to the door, yards from Craigton Cemetery in Glasgow’s south side, and said: ‘Ciaran is bleeding, he’s hurt.’
Stepfather Thomas McGee, 26, ran to the scene and found him ‘lifeless’ under a headstone near a hole in the cemetery wall. The inquiry at Glasgow Sheriff Court aims to establish whether any reasonable precautions could have prevented the tragedy and if defects in the system of work caused or contributed to the death on May 26 last year.
A post-mortem found Ciaran suffered head and neck injuries and damage to the brain stem as a result of ‘immediate cardiac arrest’.
Clutching a soft toy, Miss Griffin, a mother of four, told how she found her son on the ground. Through tears, she said: ‘I knew something really bad had happened. Blood was coming out of his ears and nose, he was lying in this puddle all around him.’
He was taken to the Royal Hospital for Sick Children but medics could not save him.
Miss Griffin said she later learned that residents had reported the hole in the cemetery wall as far back as eight years ago.
Ciaran’s father Ryan Williamson, 26, told the inquiry: ‘Because someone couldn’t do their job properly, he has been taken from me.’
He said that if the hole had been covered, Ciaran would never have been in the graveyard. The inquiry before Sheriff Linda Ruxton continues.