“When I arrived at the end of the street it was chaos,” he recalls. “There was lots of screaming, lots of shouting, lots of crying.” Quickly, he was joined by further ambulance crews.
Insp Will Stephens was one of the first police officers on the scene. He breaks down as he recalls how he joined in efforts to revive Mikey. “I was a new father at that point,” he says. “I just remember drawing parallels, thinking how dreadful it would be if my little boy ended up in that situation. And that was upsetting.”
Mikey was unconscious and did not have a pulse, Wain-Hobson says. The doctor says it took him and the ambulance crews some time to find the injury, which was on the back of Mikey’s neck. But when they did, they saw “it was a very, very extensive and very deep wound in a critical part of the body”, says Wain-Hobson.
While the medics, neighbours and police had tried their best to save Mikey, Wain-Hobson says, “I don’t think that was a survivable injury”. At 23:28, Mikey was declared dead.
At the work event in Birmingham, Hayley went to pick up her phone to take a photograph and realised she had a lot of missed calls. She rang Mikey’s phone and one of his friends answered. It was the friend who told her Mikey had been stabbed, she says: “He’s gone, Hayley, he’s gone.”
She’d had no idea about the party or that Mikey had been in Bath. The next two and a half hours were spent in a taxi to city, “wishing I could just get there”.
When she arrived at the street she saw a police car, a forensics tent, officers in white suits. “I was asking: ‘Is he still there?'” she recalls. It was raining by now. She remembers imploring someone: “Please don’t leave him out in the cold.”
