I could have spent days going through statements and interviews to compile this, but I wouldn't have been able to see the screen any more for tears. If you spent the hours when the HIP report was being discussed in Parliament posting about Jose Enrique's dress sense, (and some did, or near enough) please have a little read. There are some things the world stops for.
Then go here -
https://submissions.epetitions.direct.gov.uk/petitions/40925 - and sign for Anne.
Anne Williams, mother:“Saturday, 15 April 1989. I got up at five o’clock to open the newsagent’s where I worked. This particular morning I went into Kevin’s room and woke him up. His room was full of Liverpool posters and programmes. He always slept with his Liverpool FC blanket on top of his duvet. It must have been really hot. He wanted to get up early because he was excited about the game and had decided to get the first police escort train to Sheffield. ...An hour or so later, Kevin came into the shop for crisps and cokes. Kevin said he would be home at about nine o’clock. I told him to enjoy himself and to be careful, like any mother would. As he went to the door he waved his arm and shouted across the shop: ‘No worries, Mum. Three-nil!’ That was the last time I saw my son alive.”
Damian Kavanagh, survivor:“The crowd pressure was ever increasing and the lads on the crush barrier behind me were really struggling. This was as bad as I'd ever experienced and was getting worse. It didn't feel like a surge, more like steadily increasing overcrowding. ... A man immediately behind my shoulder was in pain and couldn't even try to help himself any more. He was wearing a wind cheater style jacket (I seem to remember white, yellow and grey markings on it). He was just pleading, “Please… please… please…”
“Maybe six feet in front of me a fella said “Come on lads, let's get this young girl out” and people tried to help. She looked maybe 12 years old or so, with dark hair. I can't say I know what happened to her.
“The singing had well stopped around me by now, with everybody here struggling. There were cries for help, cries of pain and cries to the police just a matter of yards in front of me to open the gates at the perimeter fence. The police were ignoring the requests and as I caught the eyes of one myself I made a point of shouting at him to open the gates. He just looked at me and mouthed at me to get back, which of course was totally impossible. It appeared as though a gate down at the front had sprung open under the pressure but it looked to me as though the police were pushing the crowd back in.
“[I had] a bit of luck that tragically a lot of other people didn't get, and I managed to wriggle upwards, half way above the crowd. Some fella who was stuck there himself stretched out his hand: “Here y'are mate!”. He helped my foot so I could drag myself upwards onto the top of the crowd. I crawled towards the gate down at the front, grabbed the top of the frame at the opened gate and was about to escape when a policeman aggressively grabbed hold of me. He shouted at me, pushing me back and I quote: “You fucking twat!” as he stopped my progress. Despite knowing that you don't go against bizzies if you wanna stay clear of trouble, I knew this was very different and I tried to force my way past him from my vulnerable position. It worked and he threw me, out and down onto the shingle track around the pitch.
“...I walked over to the side of the pitch and ripped up an advertising board myself, getting a small cut on the fingers of my right hand. The only other physical injury I got that day – which I didn't yet know - was a bruise on my back in the shape of a hand, you could clearly see the finger and thumb marks - the pressure in the pen.”
Jenni Hicks, mother:
“A fan (Paul Taylor) pulled Victoria from the pile of bodies in pen 3. He attempted resuscitation. A police officer came along and felt for Victoria’s pulse. He had thick leather gloves on and did not remove them, yet he told Paul Taylor to abandon his efforts, Victoria was dead. Victoria was far from dead; staff at the Northern General later spent twenty minutes attempting to save her. Paul Taylor made a statement to this effect to West Midlands Police Officer Graham McCrombie. Det. Sergeant McCrombie warned Paul Taylor that he should not make such an accusation unless he could quote the officer’s badge number, otherwise Paul Taylor could end up in prison for perjury. It was blatant intimidation of a vulnerable witness. At the subsequent inquest Paul Taylor did make a statement, yes, but the gloved police officer was omitted from it. To this day, Paul Taylor bitterly regrets it.
“My husband and I set off for that football match with two beautiful daughters. We returned with a plastic bag with their belongings in it. Whilst we were making that terrible journey home, four senior South Yorkshire officers were telling vicious lies about the fans urinating on, and stealing from, the dead. Later, at the inquest, a South Yorkshire police officer testified that, as he was lifting a girl from a pen, a fan shouted out: “Throw her over here and we’ll fuck her.” He said he thought this injured girl was one of my daughters. Try to imagine the effect this had on us.
“The coroner asked the jury to disregard this officer’s evidence so the officer was not cross-examined. I wanted to know: how did he manage to hear this particular statement when other officers testified that they could not hear cries for help because of the level of noise?...
“I had thought that one day my daughters would mourn me. I wouldn't have thought I could cope with mourning them.”
Tony Evans, witness:"Numerous times I have been informed by people that they 'know' what happened in Sheffield on April 15, 1989. On every occasion, they had been told by someone else. They repeated the slurs that were placed in the public domain with brutal, nasty insensitivity by Kelvin MacKenzie in The Sun.
My eye-witness version — with its broken and twisted limbs and young people dying in the sunshine — was discounted as Scouse revisionism. After these conversations I would often wake from gruesome nightmares and howl with rage.”
Margaret Aspinall, mother:“My son, James, was 18-years-old when he died at Hillsborough. The day after the disaster I went to Sheffield to bring his body home and being a mum I took his coat with me because he didn’t like the cold.
“I remember saying to someone ‘Put his coat on, I want to take him home,’ and I was told he did not belong to me, he belonged to the coroner. In all my screams I said to them ‘He still belongs to me because no-one’s cut the unbilical cord. He’s mine and he always will be.’ That’s why I carry on. As a mother what else could I do?
“I brought five children into the world. James was my first-born. People say to me I have another four children to carry on for but I did not give birth to four, I gave birth to five. I carry on for the love, for the compassion and for the hurt I still feel for James and I’ve got to do everything in my power to fight for him. I didn’t only lose a son that day. My children also lost a brother.
“As a mum with so much love for a child I can no longer see, he is still in my heart and always will be. ...There will be no closure for us. I will never close my mind on my child.”
Phil Hammond, father:“That slur on the fans was the most heartbreaking thing when we found out. To know my son as an upright, lovely boy; he was in awe of authority. And to think that people all over the country and the world thought they were drunken hooligans who somehow caused their own deaths. ... Hilda thinks I had a mini-breakdown. I used to go over to the field where Philip played football and sit there, for hours, to be with him. I never wanted to leave.”
Adrian Tempany, survivor:“First of all, apologies are due to Our Lady, for the language. When the Hillsborough Independent Panel filed in to the press conference in the chapel of Our Lady in Liverpool's majestic Anglican cathedral, just before midday on Wednesday, the mood was sombre. Within half an hour, the air was a shade of blue; 100 journalists gathered in the chapel swearing in disbelief at the revelations contained in this landmark report.
“As a survivor of the disaster, I had a rare perspective among the media. I survived the crush in pen 3; many of the 96 died in front of me. Unable to move for over half an hour, I was condemned to watch them cry for help, throw up, plead for their lives and die. When the police finally opened the gate in the fence and the crush abated, around a dozen of them simply keeled over and hit the concrete. A heap of corpses piled up in front of me. One police officer said the scene ‘was like Belsen.’
“The noise will never leave me. Yesterday, there were periods of profound silence between the many questions directed first towards the panel and then the family groups. I almost broke that with my own tears when it was revealed that 41 of the dead might have been saved.”
Brenda Fox, mother:“In the September my husband and I were contacted by the West Midlands police requesting us to meet them at Birkenhead Town Hall. Unfortunately even after 19 years this meeting still haunts me. When I think about it or talk about it, it’s like I have a TV inside my head and I can watch it like I am sitting and watching on my TV at home. The images are still so clear I wish I could find the off switch but I can’t and have to wait until it clears itself again.
“The officers informed us they were gathering evidence...They needed our help as they could not identify Steve on any of the photographs they had of the match and as his parents we might be able to see what they couldn’t. ...We were then shown the video from the police security cameras on the day of the crush. It was in slow motion and I don’t know how many times they had to rewind before I could see past the horrors of what was before my eyes and focus. But I did and I found a very familiar sight: the side of a head I used to wake of a morning... ‘That’s Steve.’”
Trevor Hicks, father:‘I’ll always be a chipped cup. You can wash me and clean me but I’ll always be chipped.’
Anne Williams, on the day after the HIP report:“The thought of being able to wake up one morning and not be thinking straight away about files and documents is a welcome one. I can't wait until I can know my little boy is at peace, with a correct death certificate, because I want a life.’
