If They Had Stopped, No One Would Have Died on the A66 — So Why Are Families Still Asking the Wrong Question?
If Cole Worthy and the four young men travelling with him had not been out that night, or had not been tied to the chain of illegal activity that preceded the crash, the A66 at South Bank would have been an ordinary stretch of dual carriageway at 03:39. It was not. A Volkswagen Passat entered the carriageway against the flow of traffic and collided head-on with a marked Cleveland Police armed response vehicle. Seven people died at the scene: Worthy, 17; Theo Rae, 17; Makai Saddington, 18; Michael Robert Cahill, 23; Jakub Matusiak, 23; and two officers, PC Tom Clough, 38, and PC Matthew Blades, 37.
The sequence that morning is now reasonably clear. Around 3am a Volvo XC60 was reported ramming properties in Middlesbrough. One of those addresses was the home of Worthy’s father in Acklam. There is no suggestion the father was involved in crime. Shortly afterwards the Passat was on the move. Police linked the two vehicles. Officers pursued the Passat for just under seven minutes after it was associated with earlier alleged criminal activity and cloned plates that triggered an automatic number plate camera. When the car turned the wrong way onto the A66, the chase was aborted. About ten seconds later it struck the armed response car. The two officers who died had not been part of the original pursuit; they had been called to help search for the vehicle.
That timeline matters because it undercuts a familiar reflex after a fatal pursuit: to treat the last minutes of police action as the decisive cause. Families of some of the young men have asked whether the chase should have been called off earlier. The question arrives too late. By the time blue lights were behind the Passat, the occupants had already chosen to leave after a house was rammed, to travel at high speed through residential streets, and to drive against oncoming traffic on a dual carriageway. Those decisions did not begin with the police radio.
Four of the five occupants of the Passat had previous convictions. Several included assaulting police officers, unlicensed and uninsured driving, theft, and other public-order offences. Detectives later described the night as linked to serious and organised criminal activity. Seventeen people were arrested in the wider inquiry. The Passat was not an isolated joyride that went wrong; it sat inside a feud that had already produced a ramming attack on a family home.
None of that erases the grief of parents who buried teenagers and young men. Grief does not, however, rewrite cause. A pursuit can be scrutinised — and the Independent Office for Police Conduct is doing that, as it must after any death following police contact. Scrutiny is not the same as shifting the primary responsibility onto the officers who aborted the chase ten seconds before impact, or onto the two who were simply driving the correct way when a car came at them.
The harder question is the one parents are being asked to ask themselves: what were our children doing? Not what might the police have done differently after the car was already fleeing, already linked to violence, already heading the wrong way. If Worthy and his companions had stopped, or had never joined that night’s activity, there would have been no collision on the A66. That is not speculation. It is the plain condition of the disaster. The road did not kill seven people. The choices that put a stolen or cloned car on the wrong carriageway did.
