From the Heart

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Community joins a family’s grief – poignant appeal on senseless bashingFrom The Courier-Mail, Thursday 28 September, 2006
By Patrick Lion

PAUL Stanley can feel the support.

He also hears it when his phone rings “every three seconds” with another mourner on the end of the line: a family member, someone from his son Matt’s soccer or touch team, a friend from his school at Redlands College, someone who didn’t know his son but has been touched by his story.
Matt Stanley, the 15-year-old Thornlands student who was kicked to death outside a party on Brisbane’s east side on Saturday night, was that sort of kid.

“A lot of people used to call him ‘the Piper’ as in ‘The Pied Piper’,” Mr Stanley recalled yesterday, holding back tears. “Every time I close my eyes all I can see is my son. I walk around the house and I see things of his: I was . . . taking his shirts off the line, his photos are on the wall.

“It’s the most horrifying thing you could ever imagine happening to you: the senselessness, the feeling of loss, of just total nothingness.”

As Matt’s funeral was confirmed for 2.30pm on Friday at the Christian Reformed Church, Ormiston, Mr Stanley yesterday recalled his family’s last outing to celebrate his youngest son Nicholas’s 12th birthday at a Cleveland Indian restaurant on Saturday. Matt was dropped off at the Alexandra Hills party on the way home.

“It was such fun,” Mr Stanley recalled. “After we dropped Matthew off, my wife and Nicky and I were saying, ‘Wasn’t that great. Gee, isn’t Matt just such a beaut kid?’. Well, he was.”

The family arrived at the intensive care unit of the Princess Alexandra Hospital about 1am on Sunday morning after police told them what had happened to their son. The outlook, doctors told them, was not positive.

Due to get his learner’s plates in January, Matt had earlier told his parents he wanted to indicate on his licence that he would donate his organs if he died.

The family discussed it early Sunday morning. When the idea was floated to his younger brother, Nicholas said: “That would be great. We wouldn’t be completely losing Matty, would we? He’d still be with us.”

About midday, the person in charge of the ICU turned off Matt’s ventilator to see if he could breathe on his own.

“For about 15 minutes he could breathe but then gradually – you wouldn’t want to hear the sound that started happening – his lungs stopped working properly,” Mr Stanley said.

The ventilator was restarted and tests were performed to see if Matt had died. About 6.15pm the doctor confirmed he had.

The family, still watching Matt’s chest rise and fall from the ventilator keeping his organs alive, said their goodbyes.

“Nicky said, ‘Matty is still alive, he’s breathing’,” Mr Stanley said.

“It’s very, very hard to realise your son is dead when you turn around and look at him and his chest is still going up and down and you can see on the monitor everything is still happening.”

Matthew was brain dead but his organs were being kept oxygenated for the organ donation, a plan his family were about to be told was impossible because the coroner needed them for the autopsy.

“My youngest son lost it, I lost it, my wife lost it,” Mr Stanley said about hearing the news.

“The tragedy of this whole this thing is that Matthew is gone (and) we couldn’t even use his organs to help somebody else.” The next three days were filled with grief but a lot of support. As Mr Stanley said, there were about 120 children travelling on the Cleveland train line into the city on Sunday “just to walk in and see my son lying in a coma”.

Stepping back from his family’s torment, Mr Stanley observed a society which killed his son and, in November, will put a 16-year-old boy before the Brisbane Children’s Court charged with murder.

He urged parents to “love your kids”, saying they should check the details of the party their children were attending, find out what was happening there, who was supervising, who would be attending.

“My son was 15 years old, very popular, more popular than we even possibly imagined that he was, a very, very talented young sportsmen, very intelligent, very personable and now very dead.”