The call was a bolt out of the blue. No advance warning.
“Would you like the clothes your son was wearing the night he was killed?”
There had been no official contact for years. Why would there be? After all, he’s been dead for over four years and already his killer is out walking the streets.
The procedural stuff had been done and dusted a long time ago. A teenager had been arrested and charged, the trial was done, he had served his ridiculously light sentence and is now home free on easy street.
Time for the family to pull themselves up by the bootstraps and just get on with it. Mourn your loved one who died long before his time but life goes on.
Except…wait, there’s something we forgot. His last ever outfit he wore is lying in an evidence cupboard somewhere and there’s a box needing ticked. Sign here and you can have it back.
Can you imagine getting such a phone call? On the back of all the other horrendous phone calls you’ve endured over the years.
The call to say he’s on his way to the hospital seriously injured after he’s been punched to the ground. The call to say he’s not going to make it and asking if he’s an organ donor. The call to say: “We’ve got his killer in custody. “The call to say there’s going to be a trial but you can’t have his body back yet as we need to cut him open again for another post-mortem.
Then there’s the endless calls to say the killer is appealing his sentence, as light as it is, that he’s trying to get out on parole and, finally, the call you’ve been dreading – he’s out. He’s served four years for killing your son but he’s free now. You’d think that’s the end of the dreaded calls but nope, the justice system wants to serve up just a wee bit more agony for you.
That’s what happened this week to the family of Shaun Woodburn – a much-loved, much -respected 30-year-old dad and an innocent bystander who encountered Mohammed Ibnomer and his gang as they violently rampaged across Edinburgh on Hogmanay 2016.
Record readers will know this newspaper has supported the Woodburns’ in their quest for Justice for Shaun.
His dad, Kevin, has regularly opened his heart and shared his grief with you all in a bid to highlight the glaring inadequacies and failures of a system that he believes is set up to favour the offender and not the victim.
Kevin called me this week to tell me of the latest “kick in the teeth” and described his shock when he realised what the officer who called him had said.
I’ve come to know Kevin very well in the almost five years I have been working on Shaun’s story and I think I’ve witnessed every emotion he’s endured.
I’ve seen him heartbroken and shocked when his killer was sentenced to only four years in prison, and I’ve seen the pride in his son when it was revealed Shaun’s death had saved four other lives through organ donation.
I have also witnessed the great determination to make his grief and experience mean something by fighting for the rights of other victims’ families.
In his voice this week was something new – not shock because he already suffered the biggest shock of his life when Shaun died – but disbelief and a fury that the system was, yet again, insensitive to the feelings of those left behind.
He was keen to point out he was not critical of the police or the officer who called but the procedures set down in what he describes as a cold-hearted barbaric system around dealing with the relatives of deceased crime victims.
“The pit of my stomach was in knots,” he said. “They asked if we wanted his shirt, his trousers, his underwear, socks and shoes. The shock of it was just awful. It’s barbaric and cold.
“After all this time, when his killer is already free, it beggars belief. Shaun’s mum, who got a call while at her work, was traumatised. Surely there has to be a better way of dealing with this kind of situation.
“But it still begs the question, why now? Why, after all this time?”
Two years ago, The Record backed calls by Kevin and other victim’s families for an independent Victim’s Commissioner to help those affected by crime.
Shaun’s tragic death has resulted in a change to multiple post-mortems on victims but more is needed to help them navigate the legal processes and the challenges they face.
Too often, I’ve listened to grieving families weep at the heartlessness of a system they say chews them up and then spits them out.
Faceless bureaucracy that leaves them feeling even more battered and bruised.
Smarter justice comes from listening to families like the Woodburns – not just Government appointed experts and their box-ticking exercises.
