STANDING ON Duke Street in Whitehaven yesterday morning, local electrician Darren Williamson remembered that he had only seen one dead body during tours with the Royal Marines in Afghanistan and Iraq and then only from a distance.
“I never thought that I would come back to Whitehaven and find people I know dying on the street in front of me. This kind of thing doesn’t happen in Whitehaven, it doesn’t,” he said quietly.
But it has happened.
During minutes of rage, local taxi driver Derrick Bird killed colleague Darren Rewcastle and injured two more – but he had already killed even before he pulled up to the taxi-rank at about 10.30am.
Following 24 hours of frantic investigation, Cumbrian police are now certain that the slaughter began in the early hours when Bird shot his twin brother, David, in the face with a shotgun.
From there, he went to Frizington to the home of local solicitor, Kevin Commons, whom he blamed for his role in drafting a will for his mother, Mary, who is suffering from cancer and who lived with Bird in a terraced house in Rowrah. Yesterday she was stunned by the tragedy that had taken the lives of her two sons.
“She just couldn’t make sense of it. She kept saying she wanted to talk to them, she wanted to talk to her sons,” said a neighbour Joe Ryan, who spoke as police officers guarded the cottage on Rowrah’s main street.
“The place hasn’t even come to terms with the loss of the two teenagers killed in a bus crash last week,” said local Whitehaven businessman, Gerrard Richardson, who only learnt that Mr Commons, a close friend, had died when someone passed a list of the dead to him in the local radio station.
Throughout yesterday, Whitehaven Church of England Reverend John Bannister comforted those he could, stopping on the streets to talk to small knots of locals who gathered again and again at corners, while a steady stream quietly entered the town’s two churches for gentle reflection.
Today, the second of the bus victims, Kieran Goulding will be laid to rest in Whitehaven, following a service conducted by Rev Bannister.
Some of those killed, or bereaved on Wednesday attended a memorial service for him in a local school on the Tuesday night, just before Bird argued with colleagues on the Duke Street rank and where he promised a “rampage” when he returned the day after.
The funeral service for Goulding will be but one in a seemingly endless cortege of death that will take place over the coming weeks in churches for 20 miles around; one that has left this town and all of the districts surrounding it, numb beyond measure.
