They Drove the Wrong Way Down the A66. Seven Died. Now the Funerals Are Forcing Middlesbrough to Watch the Footage Again
Mourners have been lining streets in Middlesbrough this week as funerals begin for the young men killed when a Volkswagen Passat travelled the wrong way along the A66 and struck a marked Cleveland Police car. Schools closed early again so families could get children home. Processions drew large crowds. Videos from the night of the crash have resurfaced alongside the corteges, and with them a harder argument than grief alone: the collision did not happen in a vacuum.
The crash took place at about 03:39 BST on 22 August near South Bank. Five people were in the Passat: Michael Robert Cahill, 23; Jakub Matusiak, 23; Makai Saddington, 18; and 17-year-olds Theo Rae and Cole Robert Worthy. All five died. So did PC Matthew Blades, 37, and PC Tom Clough, 38, who were travelling in the correct direction in an armed response vehicle that had been in the area to help locate the car.
Police had already been following the Passat for almost seven minutes after reports of dangerous driving and other incidents that night, including a Volvo XC60 that rammed properties. One of those addresses belonged to Cole Worthy’s father. Investigators later linked the two vehicles. The Passat was believed to be using cloned plates. When it turned onto the dual carriageway against the flow of traffic, officers aborted the pursuit. About ten seconds later it hit the police car head-on. Nobody survived.
Inquests opened with provisional findings of catastrophic head, neck and chest injuries. Four of the five occupants of the Passat had previous convictions. Those records included assaulting police officers, driving without a licence or insurance, theft from vehicles, shoplifting, possession of a knife and a class C drug, and racially aggravated harassment. Only Cahill had no prior convictions listed in official briefings after the crash. Twelve people were later arrested as Cleveland Police examined organised crime, firearms and related offending connected to the hours before the smash. Some have been charged.
That is the official timeline. What has travelled with the funerals is unofficial: doorbell and dashcam clips of the Passat tearing through residential streets, and the claim that if the occupants had stopped — for themselves, for anyone else on the road — two officers and five young men might still be alive. The pursuit had already been called off. The police car they hit was not chasing them. Stopping was still a choice available in those last seconds.
It is late for that choice now. Responsibility sits first with the people in the car: the person at the wheel, the passengers who stayed in a vehicle already linked to ramming and flight, the group that kept going the wrong way on a dual carriageway in the dark. Blaming the officers who ended the chase does not rewrite the physics of a head-on impact.
The funerals have also reopened a quieter argument about how those choices were formed. Respect for other people’s lives is not invented at 3.39am on the A66. It is taught, or it is not, long before a cloned plate triggers a camera. Parents and families are the first place that lesson either takes hold or fails. Courts, schools and police arrive later, after patterns of theft, assault and illegal driving have already been set.
Middlesbrough is burying the dead in public. The footage will keep circulating. The investigation will run its course. None of that changes the last decision inside that Passat: they did not stop.
