Watch a short film by Brake where Nicola talks about the impact of Aaron's death and how support from Brake has helped her.
On the night of the crash, Nicola and Aaron’s younger brother Luke, 8, were away on a camping trip. Nicola’s mobile phone rang in the middle of the night, but it was a number she didn’t recognise so she didn’t answer and drifted back to sleep. The next thing she knew, she was woken by the tent zipper going up. Her husband Andrew was there to tell her that Aaron had been involved in a collision, and he had been killed.
“From that day, my life was just shattered,” says Nicola.
The boys had gone to McDonald’s to get some food. The driver of the car had been seen driving dangerously before the crash.
“He had been driving around recklessly for quite a while,” says Nicola. “I’ve seen footage of the car pulling up at McDonald’s, I’ve seen footage of the car leaving. He had no care for his passengers at all. He tailgated a car all the way through Bedale, beeping his horn. They then came to some roadworks, which were on a red light, and he went through the red light and just floored his car.”
The driver lost control going round the corner at a speed of 75mph and hit a tree. Aaron and the two other passengers were killed instantly. The driver was seriously injured but survived the crash.
“After the funeral, you tend to have people coming round every day,” Nicola continues. “You then get silence, and it’s hard because everyone else just goes back to their daily life and you’re stuck in a world that you don’t want to be in, but you have no choice.”
Nicola realised she needed some help for herself and to enable her to support Luke after everything he’d been through. This was when she reached out to Brake for emotional and practical support.
Aaron, 18, died in a crash when the vehicle he was travelling in lost control.
When you’re grieving, the world doesn’t make sense, nothing makes sense. It’s hard to understand what’s happening to you as a person so to have somebody explain that to you and reassure you that it’s ok was what I needed.
“It took me a lot of courage and strength to pick the phone up and make that telephone call. And actually, it was ok!” she says. “Just to have somebody walk through the door and sit at the other side of the table, and you know that they can understand what you’re saying, they know where you’re coming from. The reassurance that you’re not losing your mind is important. Because when you’re grieving, the world doesn’t make sense, nothing makes sense. It’s quite hard to understand what’s happening to you as a person so to have somebody explain that to you and reassure you that it’s ok was what I needed."
Nicola was worried because she didn’t know how to explain to Luke what had happened. “The best thing we were given was the book from Brake, which is aimed at kids and goes through each step of what happens when someone is killed in a road crash. We worked through it with Luke and he did engage with it. I’m forever grateful that book was there.
“The support from Brake helped me more than I think anybody will ever know. Actually all I needed was someone who could reassure me that my feelings and what I was going through were normal and it gave me a little bit of hope that I could fight this and I could keep going.”
One of the hardest things for Nicola is that Aaron will never have the chance to fulfil his ambitions and dreams, go to university, travel the world, have fun with his friends, get married or have kids.
“Aaron had a passion for life that was unwavering. He loved his friends and his little brother, he cared about them deeply. He had the world at his feet and he could have gone on to do whatever he wanted to do.”
By telling her story, Nicola hopes to reach out to young people and get them to realise that driving a car is dangerous.
“If it stops another family from going through the unimaginable pain and heartache that we’re going through, then at least somebody out there is listening.
“The laws around young drivers need to change. People have been campaigning for graduated driver licensing to help keep our young drivers safe for many years, and it hurts me that nobody out there seems to be listening. I know that if the laws had been changed, Aaron could still be sat here with me today.”