Mum relives final talk with her son before his death
THE mother of a teenager whose body was found in the River Tawe fought back tears as she relived her final conversation with him.
Donnie Yuen said she reminded Alex Pavlou to be sensible ahead of a night out in Swansea city centre with friends.
“I said, ‘I will see you tomorrow’, and that’s the last thing I ever spoke to him,” she said.
Ms Yuen then told the inquest into her son’s death how she became aware of his disappearance the following day.
She said she would have offered to pick up her son from the city centre on the night of May 27, 2015, but that she had previously arranged to go out that night in the Pontarddulais area and stay overnight with her partner.
The 19-year-old former Olchfa School pupil died after his night out on Wind Street, during which time he got separated from his pals.
Alex was last seen by staff at Sainsbury’s, Swansea Marina, and a police officer who had called into the petrol station there on his way to patrol Fabian Way.
It emerged during Ms Yuen’s evidence that Alex, who she said rarely drank alcohol, had on one occasion been brought back home in the early hours by police after being picked up at the marina drunk and without his shirt.
Referring to the morning of May 28, 2015, Ms Yuen said: “I thought to myself, shall I call him to make sure he’s awake for work? But I have never had to wake him up to go to work or school. I didn’t call him — he’s so responsible.”
She explained that she picked up her niece from St Michael’s School, Llanelli, and then drove her to her flat in Sketty, noticing straight away that Alex’s car was there.
She said she thought her son may have slept at a friend’s house and then been given a lift to work, but there was an answer phone message on the landline at 9.10am from Celtic Wealth Management, where Alex was employed as a financial consultant, asking if he was coming in.
A couple of hours later, after checking his bedroom, Ms Yuen tried to contact her son by text, phone and WhatsApp, but there was no reply.
“I tried to contact him once every hour,” she said. “At about 2.30pm the doorbell rang. A uniformed policeman was outside the door, saying he was looking for Alexander. “I said I was looking for him too. “He started asking me who he had been with. He said it’s to do with an incident in the early hours near Sainsbury’s.
“I said, ‘Is he in trouble?’ He said, ‘No, I can’t tell you.’”
Ms Yuen said she then texted Alex’s older brother, Christopher.
He looked for information online and read that police were “looking for a body” in Swansea Marina.
Alex’s body was discovered there the following day on May 29.
By that time many people had descended on Ms Yuen’s flat to try to help, while her ex-husband — and Alex’s father — was flying to the UK from Hong Kong after being told Alex was missing.
“At 12-ish they said they had found a body. They had to identify him.”
Ms Yuen said items found with the body identified it as Alex’s.
Yesterday’s jury hearing at the Civic Centre was a resumption of an inquest halted by acting assistant Swansea coroner Paul Bennett in September.
Mr Bennett said at the hearing that he had widened the scope of the proceedings to take into account a gap in the railings and lack of lifebelts in the vicinity where a cry was heard in the water by a passerby in the early hours of May 28.
A previous inquest in March was abandoned when Ms Yuen was spoken to by a jury member.
Ms Yuen said during the hearing that Alex was a talented sportsman who had represented Swansea District Schools rugby, played county age-group cricket on a tour to South Africa, and was ranked in the UK top 20 as a sprinter when he was 13.
She said he had gone to University College London in September 2014 to study medicine but that he had returned to Swansea the following March after having a rethink about his career.
Shortly afterwards he landed his financial consultant role.
He then planned to study economics at Oxford University before finally settling again on his original “dream” to become a doctor.
Ms Yuen said she had hardly seen Alex drink alcohol and that his disappearance on the night of May 27 was “so out of character”.
But she told of an incident on the night when Alex was celebrating his A-level results when she was awoken by a knock on the door at 2am the following morning.
“Alex was standing with police behind him,” she said. “He had no shirt on. He was very drunk, and didn’t know what had happened to his shirt. The next morning I asked him. He said, ‘Mum, I was being pursued by murderers, and I had to distract them by taking off my shirt’. “It didn’t make sense.” She added: “I was told recently that police had found him by the marina and brought him home.”
The inquest continues.