Middlesbrough Thought the A66 Horror Was Over. One Family’s Funeral Speech Just Reignited the War
Middlesbrough is burying its dead again. Five young men died in a Volkswagen Passat on the A66 in the early hours of 22 August. Two Cleveland Police officers died with them. This week the town is saying goodbye, funeral by funeral. After Jakub Matusiak and Theo Rae, it was Makai Saddington’s turn. His parents spoke. What they chose to say — and how they chose to remember him — has split a community that was already raw.
The facts of the crash are no longer in dispute. Officers had pursued a Passat believed to be using cloned plates. The chase lasted just under seven minutes and was called off when the car entered the A66 against the flow of traffic. About ten seconds later it struck a marked armed-response vehicle that had not been part of the pursuit. PC Matthew Blades, 37, a father of two, and PC Tom Clough, 38, a former soldier, were killed. So were Michael Robert Cahill, 23; Jakub Matusiak, 23; Makai Saddington, 18; and 17-year-olds Theo Rae and Cole Worthy. Inquests opened with provisional findings of catastrophic head and other traumatic injuries.
What followed was not only grief. Four of the five occupants of the Passat had criminal records. Saddington had pleaded guilty to possessing a knife and a Class C drug, to multiple assaults on police officers, and to a racially aggravated public-order offence weeks before the crash. He was awaiting further proceedings. Police later arrested a dozen people in connection with organised crime around the night of the collision. A house belonging to Cole Worthy’s father had been rammed shortly before the group set off. Extra officers were drafted into Teesside. A later house fire nearby added to the sense that the crash sat inside a wider, uglier feud.
Funerals have become flashpoints. Schools closed early for Matusiak’s service after fears of quad bikes, crowds and disorder. Some residents called the public mourning for the five young men a mockery of two officers who were simply doing their jobs. Others insisted the dead were still sons, brothers and friends, and that grief does not require a clean record. Orange balloons, flares and masked riders at an earlier vigil only sharpened the argument.
Saddington’s funeral at St Bede’s Chapel on 8 September brought that argument inside the chapel. His parents used the service not only to mourn an 18-year-old but to frame the story of his life. For supporters, that is what parents do: they refuse to let a headline swallow a child. For critics, any language that softens the night of 22 August, or that treats the officers as an afterthought, is an insult to two families who will never see their husbands and fathers again. The speech did not invent the divide. It made the divide impossible to ignore.
That is the real wound in Middlesbrough now. Seven people are dead. Two of them wore uniforms and left young children. Five of them were barely adults, some already known to the courts. A town cannot agree on how to speak about all of them at once. Parents have a right to bury their son in their own words. The public has a right to ask what those words leave out. Until both truths can sit in the same room, every funeral will feel like another argument rather than an ending.
Cole Worthy’s service follows. The questions will not be buried with him.
