It was, yeah, I remember it being one of the busiest weeks of my year because I was working at summer school, and I was quite used to, to doing this because it was something I’d done over a number of years, so I was prepared and geared for this very, very busy week that I was going to have.

 

And anyway the second day I was exhausted, I remember coming home, being very, very tired, my family and myself, because my wife also does the summer school with me, and my son attended with us, and he was very, very young at the time, so it had been a really, really busy day and we came home and I remember us having a very, very early night, and going to bed round about eight. And then it was phone call that that woke me up, and I didn’t actually get to the phone in time, but when I did I received a message and it was my sister’s boyfriend and in the message he had just said that my brother had been shot, and my family had gone to the hospital. I called back and he sort of gave me a bit of, of detail on what had happened, and my sister had just left, my Mum had just left for the hospital, Junior had been shot, and we refer to him as Junior because Junior was named after his Dad, who was Dorrie, and at home we called him Junior, because he was Dorrie Junior.

 

So I got the call, I remember putting the phone, the phone down, and turning to my wife, and telling her that Dorrie Junior had been, had been shot and the first thing I felt I needed to do was to pray, because I had the faith in God, and I believed that he was going to be with me, and was going to protect me and was going to, I think make sure that everything was going to be right. And I guess even that faith at that particular time, I also believed that nothing would seriously happen to my brother, that he wasn’t, wasn’t going to die, he wasn’t going to you know die like they were, that the faith that I had was going to make sure that he would live. Like there was a sense of going down in and praying that he would be okay, and that he would be fine.

 

And as I started that prayer the phone went again, and I stopped praying, I picked up the phone and it was my sister on the phone and her words were, “Junior’s dead.” And my whole body just went numb.

 

My whole body was just, it’s an experience that I’ve never had before, and I’ve never had since. Because everything in my whole being just became paralysed for from a moment and I remember just screaming a scream that just came out from the bottom of me you know. I remember, my sister recalls that hearing it on the phone, this scream that she’d never heard before in her life, and my voice never had sounded like that before, and since, but it was just it was almost as though something had been removed. I can only describe it as something like a leg or an arm, something had been removed from my body and I was never going to have it back again.

 

And I was totally lost in that that grief, that shock, and I was just lost for a period of time, and I guess quickly I went back to my faith. I went back to God again and thinking, “God Why? That shouldn’t have happened to me, that shouldn’t have happened to my family.” You know, we’re a God-fearing family, where we’re, we’ve always believed in you, we’ve always had faith in you, we’ve prayed together, we’ve done all the things, why has that happened to my baby brother?”