The Foundation would like to acknowledge The Courier-Mail for allowing the reproduction of this article published on September 17, 2008
In the name of the son
By: Mike O’Connor
Paul Stanley lost his son but he’s determined other teens will be saved by his anti-violence crusade
PAUL Stanley remembers the last time his son ran out on to a touch football field.“ It was on the Friday night. It was dark because some of the lights were out. He scored at the far end of the field, running across from one side to the other. He must have hit each sideline about three times. No one could tell what he was going to do,” Stanley says.“The referee told me he’d never seen a touchdown scored like that. He said he could be an international. It was the greatest game I’d ever seen him play.”
Twenty-four hours later, Matthew, aged 15, was attacked by a drunken 16-year-old outside a party and killed with a single punch.
“Matthew was punched, he was knocked to the ground, and then they laid the boot into him. He had two fractures of the skull. One from hitting the ground, the other probably from a kick and then somebody knee-dropped him as well, crushing one of his lungs,” says his father, his voice breaking as tears cloud his eyes.
It’s two years next Tuesday since Matthew’s death. In the time that has passed since then, Paul Stanley and his wife Kay have dedicated a large part of their lives to the Matthew Stanley Foundation, attempting to educate youths to the dangers of violence.
“When I give talks to kids at school, I tell them that there’s teenage talk and then there’s the language of their parents. When their parents say: `Where are you going tonight?’ and `Whose party is it?’ it doesn’t mean they don’t trust you. “I tell them that the translation of their Mum and Dad asking: `Are you going out tomorrow night?’ is: `Please God, say no, because I’m terrified.’
“When they ask: `Whose place are you going to?’ they mean: `Is it going to be close enough so that I can get there in time if something happens?’“What they’re really saying is: `You walk out the door and you leave my protective umbrella. Please, just come home!’,” he says.
Stanley’s strength is palpable. He smiles and jokes as he makes us coffee in the Thornlands home in which his son was reared. The good-looking boy with the shock of blond hair smiles down on us from photos around the living room.
His father may be strong but his grief runs deep like a subterranean stream, surfacing when it can no longer be contained. “Matty, he was too good a boy. Shit! You just don’t forget!” he says, wiping his eyes with the back of his hand. “I was down at his school, Redlands College, this morning and if there was one there would have been 70 kids walk up to me and say `Hi, Mr Stanley’.
“On the Sunday (after the assault), the kids started arriving at the hospital at daylight. They just walked into the hospital room. Very few of them left. The head of the intensive care unit said they’d never seen anything like it before.”
Matthew’s grave has become a shrine, visited by the students with whom he played and studied. “I go to his grave at least once a week and there’s always fresh flowers there,” he says. “There’s a touch football on the grave the kids have used as a message board to him.
“Occasionally, there’s a new message written on it but it’s getting a bit battered after two years.”
Stanley has refused to accept government funding for the foundation, relying instead on his own fundraising. If he accepts government money, he feels he will have to dance to its tune and be bound by political correctness and he has no intention of doing that.
He describes the death of his son as the catalyst for the foundation which preaches the message that actions have consequences, a crusade that now takes him statewide.
His talks to students are powered by images of the tragedy that engulfed him. “I show the kids a DVD of the Channel 9 news reports,” he says. “It shows Matthew’s blood on the roadway, it shows the coppers holding up the football jumper with Matthew’s blood all over it, the one that one of the kids took off and put Matty’s head on. It’s pretty much in-your-face. “The idea of it is so that I can say to young people: `What I am talking to you about actually did happen’. By showing the kids the reality of violence and death, I hope to get through the message: `Hold back on your punch’.”
He does not waste his time, he says, telling them not to drink. “I never tell them not to drink, not to take drugs, not to jump into bed with someone, because they’re not going to take any notice of me. What I do say is: `Ladies and gentlemen, you’ve got to look to the consequences of your actions. If you get pissed, your judgment will be different. You could do something that will haunt you for the rest of your life’.”
Stanley concedes that if he had not begun the foundation, his life may have been easier but says he is determined to continue it for as long as he has the health and strength to do so.
The sadness, however, is never far removed. “I walk down the street and one of his friends will walk out of a shop, look at me and start crying. “It’s not fair. But to be able to say that Matt hasn’t been forgotten, as so often happens, that’s important,” he says, pausing as his voice falters. “Matt,” he says, “he was a bloody top kid.”
His sorrow turns to anger when he speaks of a justice system which he believes served him and his wife poorly. “He pleaded guilty to manslaughter,” he says of his son’s killer. “He was sentenced to five years to be released after 2 1/2 years. My son’s life was worth 2 1/2 years. That’s disgraceful. “He gets out of jail at the beginning of next year at about the same time Matt would have been starting university. Can you tell me that’s justice?
“It stinks,” he says, silence filling the room. It’s all been said. There’s nothing left to say.
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