A parent’s nightmare
GRIEVING father Hugh Dorey told of his family’s pain and described his horror at coming upon a crash near his home, which turned out to be the scene of his beloved boy’s death.
In a moving statement read from the witness box, William Dorey’s dad told how the lives of him, his wife, Gill, and their other boys, Joseph and Daniel, will never be the same.
It was after a day preparing for his A-level exams last May the Kings Priory School student decided to go for a run to the Delaval Arms pub, at Seaton Sluice, and back to the family home in Whitley Bay.
When the “sensible and reliable” 18-year-old had not returned within the time frame his parents expected, concern began to turn to worry.
“We expected to see him bounding towards home like he always did,” said Mr Dorey at the sentencing hearing of the boy racers who killed his son.
“Gill used to tell him he looked like Superman when he was running.
“I drove no more than a few hundred yards and I came upon a number of police cars with flashing blue lights blocking the road ahead,” he told the court.
“I kept glancing up the road, half expecting Will to come running down towards me.
“At this point I didn’t know what in front of me was the scene of my son’s fatal accident.”
Mrs Dorey rang her husband to see if he had found William and when he said no but that there had been an accident, she joined him at the scene.
The police asked them if their son wore glasses and they said he did. They were put in the back of a police car and their anxiety increased.
Mr Dorey said: “An officer showed us a smashed mobile phone and spectacles and asked if we recognised them.
“I said something like ‘Oh Jesus Christ’.
“Neither of us could bare to look. We turned our heads away.
“Gill then realised it was Will’s phone.
“She knew that was the end of her life as she knew it.”
The couple were told there was a “young deceased male” and were asked to go to the RVI to identify the body.“I remembered the hospital was where Will had been born,” Mr Dorey said.