22
THE ISSUE
TheChronicle December 21, 2007 TheChronicle December 21, 2007
Every week we turn the spotlight on one of the important issues........... in the community
CLICK ON NOW
Pledge your support for our new campaign at www.chester chronicle.co.uk we are asking you, our readers, to sign our online pledge at www.chesterchronicle.co.uk and help make a difference. ■ Drivers – Report any reckless driving you see on the roads. Lead by example – drive safely, take
care on the roads, check your vehicle regularly. ■ Parents – talk to your child about the risks and responsibilities of being a driver and a passenger, make sure they realise how many young drivers and passengers die on the roads each year. ■ Teenagers – Tell your friends if you don’t like the way they drive. Don’t ride in their car if you aren’t comfortable. Make it clear you don’t agree with the boy racer culture. Make it clear that drivers – male or female – who take risks are not attractive. ■ If you have been affected by a tragedy on the roads, call Rebecca Edwards on 01244 606415
A JOKER: Tristan Cook.
TRISTAN Cook will always be remembered as “a joker with a generous heart,” say his family. His father Haydn says his son was proud to have just reached six feet tall. He said: “I will never forget his big feet and hairy legs sticking out from under his dressing gown, because he often got up late. “He had started in the lower sixth and was just beginning to realise he was going to have to do a bit of work. “He had an ambition to start a nightclub called ICE, and he and his friends started a Young Enterprise group called ICE Entertainments and held their first business meeting in our house annexe. “I took over cans of coke for them and I left the empty cans over there for months, because they reminded me of Tristan.” Tristan was best man aged 11 when Haydn and his step-mother Dorothy married in 2001. Dorothy said: “He had a really good voice but used to mess about. He was a joker, it was him who started calling me Dorf when he was a little boy, and it stuck and then turned into the Dorfmeister.” Tristan’s friends acted as coffin bearers at his funeral and his mother Meriel Pritchard
ic as an entertainer who taught himself to juggle, unicycle and played the drums. Erica said: “On holiday he would spend his time juggling for all the other little children – they would follow him along the beach like the pied piper. “We would be sitting out in the garden and he would come out and just start entertaining us. “He loved skiing with his father, kite surfing and scuba diving. His Christmas present last year was to dive with Wilma the sand shark at the Blue Planet Aquarium, but of course he never got to do it.” The couple say they are grateful to everybody who helped them through the last year, and for the tributes to Dominic and Tristan mounted across Chester. Erica wears orange clothing every day in memory of Dominic and to mark the work they are doing for the orang-utans. Orange flowers have also been planted at the crash site and the family wore orange ribbons every day to the court trial.
says they were an important part of his life. “The previous summer he went to Newquay with a big group of friends, and was due to be booking a holiday to Ibiza the Monday after he died. “He had a big smile on his face when he told me his friends had agreed to wait until he was 17 so he could go with them to Ibiza – he was really touched by that.” Meriel added: “He was a live wire, he loved sport and music. He lived for the moment and that, ironically, is probably linked to the way he died, because he would have view it as being a fun night out with his friends. “He wouldn’t for a moment have understood the potential consequences of that.” Meriel said the Leeds United supporter was proud of his roots in North Yorkshire before moving to Chester when he was nine. He was interested in fashion and designer clothes and was due to work his second shift at Next the morning after he died. Meriel added: “The only good thing that has come out of this experience has been the extraordinary support and love that our friends and colleagues are offered. We want to say how grateful we are to all of them.” ■ Next week – Tristan’s sisters talk about the loss of their brother.
Tristan was a live wire
ANIMAL lover and strict vegetarian Dominic Arnold’s memory lives on through his family’s work to rescue orphaned orang-utans in Borneo. His mother and step-father Erica and Damien Murphy decided to give funeral donations to the orang-utan conservation projects at Chester Zoo, because they knew their son would have approved. The couple and their daughter Rebecca,19, visited the animals in the wild in Borneo last August and hope to raise further funds for the foundation featured on the BBC’s Orangutan Diary series. Erica said: “Dom had every David Attenborough DVD, he loved animals, he was always having a go at us for eating meat. Damien added: “There has to be something good to come out of this. Deforestation is destroying the orang-utan’s habitat and leaving the babies orphaned. If we can save some of them, it will be something good.” The couple say they will remember Domin-
w www.recycleforcheshire.org.uk
For recipes and practical tips to help you reduce food waste visit
We buy and then waste around £8 billion on food that could have been eaten
County and district councils working together in partnership
MEMORY LIVES ON: Erica Murphy presented Mike Jordan of Chester Zoo with donations for their orang-utan projects in Dominic’s memory.
Family continues Dom’s conservation fight to save orang-utans
23
Our loss must not be in vain
The Chronicle believes too many young drivers and passengers die on Cheshire roads every year. We want to make 2008 the year when fatality and injury rates for under 25 year olds fall in Cheshire. In the Too Young To Die campaign we pledge to publish a series of articles throughout 2008 highlighting the need to respect the roads. We will campaign for changes in the law and improved education for young people before and after they start to drive. We believe changes in attitude must start at community level so
Make a pledge to help save a life in 2008
REMEMBER ALWAYS: Parents Haydn and Dorothy Cook, Meriel Pritchard and Tristan’s 14-year-old sister Tamsin. IC191207tribute
A Chronicle campaign
with his wife Dorothy. He remembered: “The police thought Tristan was 19 because he had fake ID on him. For a moment your heart leaps at the thought it might not be him – you wouldn’t wish this on anyone else, but there is a glimmer of hope and you grasp at it. “I had to go to identify the body. You just don’t believe you are ever going to have to do something like that. “He just looked intact – we heard later that he had horrific internal injuries but he just had a little bit of blood on his ear and that was the only outward sign of what had happened.” The family is now facing a second Christmas without Tristan. Hadyn said: “We are going to have as good a Christmas as we can. Last year we put Tristan’s Christmas presents on his grave. We will go to the service at Christleton church and we will visit Tristan’s grave there. “When people are driving I don’t think they realise the risk and the potential consequences of what they are doing – to snuff out two lives is just so awful.” The week of the crash, Dominic’s mother and stepfather were in Australia for a wedding. They last spoke to Dominic on Saturday, December 9, when he told them The Meadows were flooded. Hours later they received a call to say their son was dead. Damien said “You can’t really grasp the enormity of it. The 24-hour journey back was just horrendous, but we were numb.” Erica added “The worst thing was walking back into the house and seeing how he had left it – things like a half-finished glass of Coke on the table and his wet towel still on his bedroom floor. It was still wet. It was just horrendous.” Of the Too Young To Die campaign, Damien said: “We want something good to come out of this because we don’t want other families to experience what we have experienced. It is such a waste of two good, solid, young men who were always going to give more to the world than they took out of it.” Erica added: “The driving age should be raised to 18 because they are too immature at 17. There ought to be a probation period before they are fully licensed and they should do the Pass Plus advanced driving course. They shouldn't be allowed more than one passenger or to drive after 10pm.”
By Rebecca Edwards
Grieving families are first to support our new campaign to reduce the number of young people killed on Cheshire roads
T
wo families united in grief by the car crash that killed their teenage sons have become the first to pledge support for The Chronicle Too Young To Die campaign.
The families of 16-year-olds Tristan Cook and Dominic Arnold want to highlight the risks of reckless driving to prevent others losing a child to a car crash. The Christleton High School sixthformers died as passengers in a car driven by 18-year-old Michael Wood, of Hoole, which crashed on the A41 near Dragonhall on December 10 last year. Wood, also a Christleton sixthformer, was last week convicted of careless driving at the time of the crash, and dangerous driving earlier that night, when he performed handbrake turns, wheel spins and a long overtake close to a bend on the A41. It was Tristan’s father, Haydyn Cook, who first asked Chronicle readers to pledge to help cut road deaths. His wife Dorothy, Tristan’s mother Meriel Pritchard and Dominic’s mother and stepfather Erica and Damien Murphy, are also supporting the campaign to raise awareness about reckless driving. Meriel, a lecturer at the Social and Communications Studies department at Chester University, said: “There is something extraordinarily fundamental about the pain when you lose your own child. Something physical as well as emotional just rips you apart.” Meriel was the first parent to find out about the crash, when a police officer called at her Littleton home. She said: “I got woken up by the doorbell ringing incessantly at 3am. I was on my own in the house and as I came downstairs I thought to myself ‘why is he ringing so hard?’, then I saw the silhouette of someone standing there who was clearly not Tristan. “I opened the door, the police officer asked if I was Tristan’s mother and I said: ‘Just tell me he is all right’. He told me to sit down and I knew at that point. From then on it felt as though I was living in a film and as though the script had almost been preordained and I was just observing what was going on.” Meriel called her ex-husband Haydn at his home in Rowton, where he lives