Same Day, Two Funerals: Hundreds of Officers Line the Streets for a Fallen Colleague — While an Arrest Shuts Down Another Farewell From the A66 Crash
Hundreds of police officers from Cleveland and forces across the United Kingdom lined Hutton Avenue in Hartlepool on 9 September 2026 as PC Matthew Blades, 37, was carried into St Joseph’s Roman Catholic Church. Standard-bearers lowered flags. Four pipers and a drummer played Amazing Grace. The coffin, draped in the Union Flag, bore a floral tribute spelling “Dad.” Blades, a married father of two and an armed response officer, died with colleague PC Tom Clough, 38, in the early hours of 22 August.
That morning a Volkswagen Passat travelling the wrong way on the A66 at South Bank, near Middlesbrough, struck their marked police car head-on. All seven people in the two vehicles were killed: the two officers and five young men — Cole Worthy, 17; Theo Rae, 17; Makai Saddington, 18; Michael Robert Cahill, 23; and Jakub Matusiak, 23.
The officers had been sent to help locate the Passat after cloned plates triggered an automatic number-plate recognition camera. According to the Independent Office for Police Conduct they were not in the earlier pursuit, which was called off seconds before the car entered the dual carriageway. Cleveland Police have said occupants of the Passat may have had links to organised crime. A property in Acklam connected to Worthy was rammed and damaged before the crash. Detectives have arrested a number of people in a related inquiry into serious organised criminal activity. There is no suggestion Worthy’s father was involved in that activity.
On the same Wednesday as Blades’ ceremonial funeral, a service for Cole Worthy was under way at Teesside Crematorium. Around 12:30 BST police were called to a disturbance inside the chapel. A 39-year-old man was arrested on suspicion of assault and taken into custody. Superintendent John Wrintmore said officers attended quickly, the service later resumed, and patrols remained nearby to reassure those present.
The two ceremonies unfolding on one day laid bare how the same collision produced two public farewells of very different tone. In Hartlepool, colleagues wore patches bearing both officers’ collar numbers. Chief Constable Victoria Fuller greeted mourners. The policing minister and a Home Office minister attended. Emergency crews from the ambulance service and air ambulance stood with the police family. Blades’ widow described him as their “superhero.” A public fundraising effort for the officers’ families has passed £1.2 million.
At the crematorium the interruption was brief but stark: a funeral already shadowed by the crash, by earlier property damage, and by questions about how the Passat came to be on the wrong carriageway. Schools that had closed early for some previous funerals of those killed in the Passat stayed open for Worthy’s service.
PC Tom Clough’s funeral had not yet taken place. More services for the young men remain. The IOPC investigation into the collision continues. What happened when Worthy’s coffin was at the centre of a disrupted chapel, and what happened when Blades’ coffin passed a wall of officers, are now part of one story: seven deaths, two processions, and a region still absorbing both the honour paid to the dead officers and the unrest that followed one of the teenagers they died beside.
