Just as I leave town each week to do my shopping I pass a lamp post with bunches of flowers tied to it, most of the year the flowers are dead, except in November. There are many of these scattered across the country, each with its own tragic tale. The following is the story of this particular lamp post, the loss of three teenage friends and a day the fourth will never forget.

Who knows what those four lads were doing in the stolen car on that November day in 2003. Maybe they were bored, and taking the car was a bit of excitement, for whatever reason it was a fatal decision. They were from a town about nine miles away, and hadn’t driven far when they attracted the attention of the police. As they entered the town I live in, followed by a police car reportedly at a safe distance, (as they were aware the driver was a young and inexperienced) they went through the traffic lights, I’m not aware of whether the traffic lights were on red, amber or green, that’s not really important. Shortly after the traffic lights is a humpback bridge, this is where the 15 year old driver lost control of the car, which subsequently crashed into the lamp post, the result of which killed his three passengers, all three male friends, two 15 years olds and a 16 year old. The young driver was rushed to hospital, and spent a long time in the intensive care unit, before making a full physical recovery.

I often think about this accident with a great deal of sorrow, maybe because my own son was 15 years old at the time, I could only imagine the nightmare those lad's parents were going through. I also wonder at the atmosphere in the car. The sense of adventure, excitement and bravado, the coolness of being ‘chased’ by police, they’d be the talk of their school for days. Then the fear and horror as the driver lost control, and they realised they were going to crash! They probably would have called out the drivers name in anguished tones. Although it would only have been seconds between losing control of the car, and hitting the lamp post, those lads would have seen it happen in slow motion.

At the time, I know some people, including friends of mine, said things like ‘serves them right, they shouldn’t have nicked the car’, my answer to that was, ‘we don’t have the death penalty for car theft’.

Part of the life of being a teenager: those last years before the responsibilities of adulthood, is to have some fun, take some risks, push boundaries to the limits. Sometimes the price is too high, this was one of those times.

The fresh bunches of flowers every November, and the odd bunch now and then during the rest of the year, maybe on one of the lads birthdays, are a reminder of the tragic waste of young lives, that had only just started to blossom.