“They’re Good Kids”: After Two Officers D@ie on the A66, an Old Excuse Returns — and History Is Repeating Itself
In the early hours of 22 August 2026, a Volkswagen Passat travelled the wrong way along the A66 near South Bank, Middlesbrough, and struck a marked Cleveland Police armed response vehicle travelling in the correct direction. Seven people died at the scene: PC Matthew Blades, 37, a father of two; PC Tom Clough, 38; and five young men aged 17 to 23 — Michael Robert Cahill, Jakub Matusiak, Makai Saddington, Theo Rae and Cole Robert Worthy.
Investigators later said officers had pursued the Passat for just under seven minutes after the car was linked to earlier incidents and believed to be using cloned plates. When the vehicle entered the dual carriageway against the flow of traffic, the pursuit was aborted. About ten seconds later, the Passat hit the officers’ car. Those two officers had not been part of the chase; they were in the area to help search for the vehicle.
Four of the five young men in the Passat had previous convictions. Some included assaulting police officers, driving without a licence or insurance, theft, and other public-order offences. In the days after the crash, police arrested a dozen people across Teesside on suspicion of offences including participation in an organised crime group. A house belonging to the father of one of the teenagers had been rammed shortly before the group set out.
The human cost is unambiguous. Two officers left home on duty and never returned. Families described them as devoted, willing to help, and committed to public service. Flowers piled up outside police headquarters. A community that already lives with industrial roads, night-time disorder and repeated police call-outs was left to absorb another night that ended in seven body bags.
What has unsettled many people is not only the crash itself, but the language that followed it. Online tributes and some family circles framed the five as “good kids” whose lives should be remembered that way. That phrase is not new. Decades earlier, in the 1960s, a headteacher at a large boys’ school — the only one of its kind in the area, with more than 1,600 pupils — was remembered for a similar defence: the boys causing trouble in nearby streets were not his boys; his pupils were well-behaved. The school was big enough that almost any local lad could be claimed, or disowned, depending on the moment.
The pattern is older than social media. Adults closest to young men often reach first for protection of reputation: they are not like that at home; they were led astray; they are still children. Sometimes that is true. Sometimes it is a shield. Records of prior convictions, cloned plates, a wrong-way run on a major road and links to organised crime sit uneasily beside the claim that nothing in the character of those involved should have been visible.
None of this requires pretending teenagers are incapable of change, or that every parent is complicit. It does require honesty about consequences. A dual carriageway at 03:39 is not a playground. An armed response car on the correct side of the road is not an abstract target. Two officers died doing a job that exists because some people treat roads, property and police as obstacles rather than limits.
Inquests have opened. The police watchdog is examining the pursuit and the seconds after it ended. Criminal investigations continue. Those processes will produce facts. What they cannot decide is whether communities keep repeating the same sentence — they were good kids — as if the sentence itself were an answer. The A66 crash is a reminder that affection without accountability does not stop a car travelling the wrong way. It only makes the collision harder to look at afterwards.
