Torment of crash victim's mum

Katy McDermott cannot cross a road without holding her hand out to the little boy who, by rights, should still be by her side.

Every night, she goes into her seven-year-old son's empty bedroom, wishes sweet dreams into the darkness and kisses the pillow, right where his tousled brown head would have been.

Kyle was her life, her light; her everything.

He was riding his bike one teatime last September when a van hit him. The force threw him ten feet in the air, bounced him off the bonnet, then the windscreen. And, as the fatally injured child lay battered and bleeding in the road, the driver fled the scene.

It is a year now since Kyle died.

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"I have these little rituals; I can't stop them," she says. They are the things I would have been doing if Kyle was still alive and to not do them would make me feel guilty. Like I'd forgotten about him."

The truth is, she will never forget. The sound of his chirpy voice, the feeling of his little hand in hers. Or the image of her beautiful child's face, blood spilling from his nose and lips every time he took a breath.

Katy had been at work when Kyle was knocked down on a Mexborough street by a hit-and-run driver last September 11th.

She had taken him to school that morning, kissed him on the top of his head and told him she loved him. "I told him that scores of times every day. He was showered with love," she says.

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She went to work, secure in the knowledge that Kyle would be safe with his grandparents after school.

Ten hours later, she was rushing out of her job at Doncaster homeless shelter M25 to be by her son's intensive care bed at Rotherham District General.

He was unconscious and, though doctors fought to save him, the internal bleeding was too great. His heart and liver gave out.

As if it's not bad enough to watch your seven-year-old child dying, life has dealt Katy blow upon blow in the 12 months that have passed.

Initially there was the anguish of waiting.

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It was men in the neighbourhood who found the van, still streaked with orange paint from Kyle's bike, after mounting their own search of Mexborough's streets.

It was eight days before Mexborough 46-year-old father of two Christopher Collins was questioned. Because he cried innocence it was 17 days before Katy could bury her son.

It took six months before Collins could be charged in court.

By the time he was found guilty at Doncaster Crown Court this August, after finally admitting failing to stop and perverting the course of justice, he had spent 11 months denying he was responsible. He was given a total of five months in prison.

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And in a final cruel twist for Kyle's family, it seems he was released from prison on the anniversary of the tragedy - after serving only a few weeks.

She found out just two days after neighbours had arranged a memorial ceremony and Kyle's friends released balloons in the air bearing messages for him.

"No sentence could actually have made me feel better.

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First picture of horror crash boys.Click here. But releasing him early, and on the day that Kyle died, makes a mockery of everything,” says Katy.

Collins, who had two previous convictions for drink driving, can now pick up the threads of his life again. But Katy, her mother and father, Cath and Richard McDermott, are left with a gaping hole that can never be mended.

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“I grieve for Kyle. I miss him so much. But at the same time, I am also filled with hatred. Neither of these emotions are good. But being filled with hate ... that man could have prevented it.

“I can understand his fear when he hit Kyle. He didn’t drive down that road intending to kill a child. But the way he tried to avoid the responsibility of what he had done - there is no excuse for that.

“As police were trying to trace the driver of the van, he had a discussion with one of my friends on who it could possibly have been.”

It’s not only Kyle’s family who feel so strongly. South Yorkshire Police have been put on alert in case he returns to live in Mexborough because of the feelings expressed by local people over the case.

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But the McDermotts believe that Collins has rented out his Mexborough home and is now living in Armthorpe - close to where Kyle’s paternal grandparents live.

“He should at least have said he was sorry. He has never once shown any remorse. All his energy went into trying to get himself off the hook,” says Katy’s mother Cath, aged 68.

Kyle had been in the care of Cath and grandad Richard.

“He went out to play. I gave the usual warnings about not crossing the road. We didn’t know he’d got his bike out - he’d hidden it behind the hedge. When I heard a bang I didn’t really think anything. Then I heard someone shout Kyle’s name and I ran. All I could think was: ‘broken leg, broken leg...’

“A neighbour was holding him. His injuries were just terrible. I was praying and hoping but I’d been a nurse for 40 years and I knew straight away that he had no chance of surviving,” said Cath.

For Katy, an apology from Collins would now be too late.

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“He’s had a year,” she says. “He could have taken his opportunity at any time. But none more so than at his hearing at Doncaster Crown Court last month,” she says.

“As we waited to go in the corridor, he was standing so close behind me I could feel his breath on my skin.”

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