The culture of lawlessness and escalating gang violence in Middlesbrough which has brought armed police onto the streets of the town is encapsulated in a memorial poster for Cole Worthy, one of the teenagers killed in the catastrophic A66 crash.
Next to a photograph of the 17-year-old are the words: ‘A life so beautifully lived, deserves to be beautifully remembered.’
Only in the dystopian underclass of Teesside – and too many other areas of urban Britain where civil society has all but broken down – could the tragically short time Cole Worthy spent on this earth be glorified in this way.
Even in the picture chosen for the poster, to publicise a balloon release ‘in his honour’, he is making what looks suspiciously like a trademark hand sign signifying membership of a gang.
His balaclava-wearing entourage can be seen gesturing in the same way on social media.
We now know the posturing wasn’t just bravado. Their ilk – and the parents and families who support them – have helped turn Middlesbrough into the most dangerous place to live in the country.
The evidence is now being played out on the TV news and news websites in the violence-fuelled aftermath of the crash. No one should have to bury a 17-year-old boy and his friends.
But the sole reason Cole Worthy and four of his young associates are dead is because they were in a stolen VW Passat being driven the wrong way down a dual carriageway which was involved in a head-on collision with a police patrol car that resulted in the deaths of PC Matthew Blades, 37, and PC Tom Clough, 38.
Louie Leadbeater (right), who was jailed for three years for his involvement in a county lines gang in Middlesbrough, is pictured with Cole Worthy (left), one of the five who died in the A66 crash
Cole Worthy (right) with his friend Theo Rae, who died in the A66 car crash last Saturday
The two officers were the only truly innocent victims of the carnage. PC Blades was the father of two young boys and a popular football coach.
‘The pain of losing him is beyond words, and our lives will never be the same,’ his wife Sarah said. ‘Neither will the love he gave us ever fade,’ she added, describing him as ‘our superhero’.
PC Clough is a former soldier who served in Afghanistan. He leaves behind a partner. His family said he ‘proudly fought for his country to make the world a better place’ and was ‘always on public duty throughout his short life’.
He had a ‘fantastic’ sense of humour, they said, and was ‘willing to help anyone for any reason’.
Cole Worthy and his friends were not simply thrill-seeking for TikTok, where sharing footage celebrating reckless driving has become a dangerous trend.
They were in pursuit of a Volvo XC60 which had ploughed into the home of Worthy’s father just 40 minutes before the devastating crash in the early hours of last Saturday.
Ramming homes with vehicles has become the modus operandi in the tit-for-tat gang wars plaguing Middlesbrough.
The chilling question today, however, is whether a house fire in Grangetown on the outskirts of Middlesbrough at 5.23am on Wednesday, which claimed the lives of Valentina Foster, seven, and her aunt Natalie McDonald, 34, was a gangland attack.
PC Matthew Blades, a father of two, was killed when his police vehicle was struck head-on by a VW Passat travelling the wrong way down the A66 near Middlesbrough
PC Tom Clough also died in the crash, which occurred around ten seconds after a police pursuit of the Volkswagen had been called off
Cleveland Police stressed yesterday that detectives are not linking the house fire to the car crash.
But the Daily Mail has discovered that Natalie’s uncle is Marty Timms, 55, a notorious gangland figure on Teesside.
He is serving 14 years, with two accomplices, for gunning down a 21-year-old man in a drive-by shooting in Grangetown on May 28, 2024. The victim was riddled with bullets but survived.
Two men, aged 23 and 31, have been arrested on suspicion of murder over the fire and remain in custody.
Eyewitnesses told how another woman who was inside the house, and is in a critical condition in hospital alongside another three people who suffered non-life threatening injuries, escaped from the inferno with much of her hair burned off.
Barely 24 hours after the fatal arson attack, the front garden wall of an address near the blaze was demolished in the latest in a spate of house ramming incidents.
Then, shortly afterwards, on Thursday afternoon, armed police surrounded a property in the area after a man was stabbed and taken to hospital in an air ambulance.
Middlesbrough, then, seems to be on the brink. The local MP has described the wave of disorder as ‘terrorism’.
An extra 200 police officers are being drafted in to support the investigation into the A66 and house fire tragedies, it has now been announced.
‘Tensions are high and getting worse,’ Andy Preston, the former Mayor of Middlesbrough, told the Daily Mail. ‘No one knows what will happen next.
‘People are very, very scared. There’s a small but destructive criminal underclass that has been allowed to grow in towns like ours and politicians are too weak to confront it.’
Middlesbrough (which has a population of around 156,000) has the highest crime rate in England outside London. Teesside is also where you are most at risk of being murdered.
Makai Saddington, one of the five killed in the VW, had posted videos on TikTok of him being chased by police and was awaiting trial for racially abusing and assaulting officers
Jacob Matusiak, another occupant of the car which hit the officers’ patrol vehicle, also posted videos of himself driving recklessly
The latest statistics coincide with the thin blue line getting ever thinner here. The Cleveland force, which covers Middlesbrough, is facing a £2.4million funding shortfall – the equivalent of around 40 full-time officers.
High levels of deprivation – Middlesbrough has the greatest proportion of ‘highly deprived’ neighbourhoods out of all local authorities in the country – is one of the reasons cited for the state of near anarchy in some neighbourhoods.
Cleveland Police yesterday revealed seven more people have been arrested in the aftermath of the crash, bringing the total to 24, suggesting that the violence is being fuelled by more than postcode rivalries which have resulted in so many deadly stabbings in London and elsewhere.
Seven of the original 17 held were detained on suspicion of participating in an organised crime group including a 16-year-old and an 18-year-old.
Others were accused of possessing firearms, making threats to kill and drug dealing.
Much of the current unrest has been in east Middlesbrough, where community buildings have been daubed with tributes to Cole Worthy and the others who were in the VW – Theo Rae, also 17, Makai Saddington, 18, Jakub Matusiak and Michael Cahill, both 23 – along with the slogan ‘F*** TMF’, thought to stand for ‘The Middlesbrough Feds’ (police).
It is a world where misguided loyalty or fear of reprisals often prevents cooperation with the police. Mr Preston is all-too familiar with the code of omerta that exists here – especially now.
‘I have sometimes met people two miles from where they live. They were too scared to meet anywhere in the vicinity of their home because I was mayor and they could be seen as a ‘grass’,’ he said.
‘There are residents even too scared to call Crimestoppers anonymously. They know that the miscreants terrorising the community do what they want and maybe every now and again one of them goes to prison for a while.’
In June, two men were jailed after a shotgun was fired through the window of a house at close range, knowing there were potentially children inside.
This followed a targeted attack in which three men on a quad bike discharged a sawn-off shotgun at another property.
The scars of gangland violence are visible on many streets where there are boarded up windows and doors, along with rubble and debris piled up in gardens: the legacy of the ram-raid epidemic.
Curtis Cremin, pictured holding a huge machete, was jailed for running an organised county drugs line, in TS6 and TS3. It is understood he has links to the A66 gang
At least 12 armed police swoop on a residential street in Thornaby, North Yorkshire, overnight
Five thugs who were convicted after an organised crime investigation in East Middlesbrough. The three young men on the bottom row – Curtis Cremin, Louie Leadbeater and Laiton Hopkins – are said to be linked to the A66 crash gang
Homes in Macbean Street and Pilkington Street in the North Ormesby district were hit on August 12 and a tractor was driven into a house in Priory Road in the middle of the night in May.
‘My partner was out so I was here alone,’ said a young mum from a neighbouring terrace. ‘I was in bed when it happened. I just saw flickering lights. I looked out of the window and saw the tractor.’
A few miles away in Stockton, on the edge of Middlesbrough, a white Range Rover rammed a house five times earlier this month.
It was occupied by a couple whose son has just been released from prison, according to residents, but he refused to work for drug dealers when freed.
‘Everything is to do with drugs,’ said a local, adding that his former neighbours had been moved to a ‘safe house’.
Signs of underworld reprisals are also evident in Ruskin Avenue where there is a gaping hole under the front window of the semi where Gye Worthy – the father of Cole – lived.
It was around 3am (on August 22) that the Volvo deliberately reversed into his property. Within minutes the VW Passat with his son and his four friends inside were in pursuit.
Soon seven people would be dead. The backgrounds of the ‘gang of five’ provides a disturbing insight into inner city Britain where traditional communities have been eroded by a cancerous underclass which exists outside conventional society’s moral boundaries.
A local parent who knew Cole said: ‘He was a bright kid and could have done a lot better than he did if he had a more stable background at home.’
Mr Worthy, 39, an off-shore worker, and Cole’s mother are no longer together.
The director of a company specialising in ‘support activities for petroleum and natural gas extraction’, his father led a ‘normal life’ at home, said a neighbour.
But the parent added: ‘Cole seemed anxious to a get a reputation as a hard man, which is something he’d seen in his dad. He really looked up to his father and that seems to be where things began to go wrong.’
Valentina Foster, seven, and her aunt Natalie McDonald, 34, died in a house fire on Wednesday
A house in Acklam, Middlesbrough, linked to the father of Cole Worthy, one of the young men who died in the A66 crash, was rammed hours before Saturday’s collision
When Cole Worthy climbed into the VW Passat last weekend, he had chalked up a rap sheet of previous convictions including using threatening or abusive language to cause harassment, alarm and distress, assaulting a police officer, failing to surrender to custody, and using a mobile phone while driving.
His best friend was Theo Rae. They were both 17. Rae’s family have blamed the police for the crash.
In a now deleted post, Ryan Young, who describes himself as Rae’s uncle, wrote: ‘Just to let you know the police killed them.
‘I will fight for justice for you all. The police threw a stinger [spike strip] on the wrong side of the road and made them lose control and this hasn’t been mentioned anywhere. It is disgusting…’
Rae had 21 previous convictions (including assaulting a police officer, aggravated vehicle taking and shoplifting) and was in a stolen car when he died.
Makai Saddington lived with his mother, who moved around addresses in the deprived TS3 postcode in the east of Middlesbrough.
‘He was out of control, always tearing about on a motorbike of some kind, pulling wheelies up the street, a proper menace to younger kids who were playing outside,’ said a former neighbour.
‘He moved on from bikes to cars when he was about 17 and then got his laughs from police chases.’
A video on TikTok shows him in the back seat of an Audi involved in one such chase and he can be seen laughing as the camera pans to his face.
His uncle Aaron Saddington, 23, was jailed in June for driving at 100mph the wrong way down the A66. The same road where the fatal crash occurred.
Makai Saddington, who was 18, was a father. His son was born in January last year. At the time of his last court appearance in June for the racially aggravated harassment of an Asian police officer, Saddington was ‘of no fixed address’.
Jakub Matusiak was brought up by his mother alongside his sister and younger brother. Someone who knew him described him as a ‘good kid who was easily led’.
Matusiak also had a fascination with motorbikes and had two convictions for using a vehicle without insurance and driving without a licence. At a vigil following his death, his friends turned up in balaclavas and set off flares.
A mob of youths also descended on the vigil for Michael Cahill on Thursday night, torching several cars and setting off fireworks.
Cahill, whose family had close links with the travelling community, was from Peterlee in County Durham. The 23-year-old was the only member of the gang of five with no convictions.
Nine deaths, including two exemplary police officers, and 24 arrests in the space of a few days.
Many people will be familiar with a dystopian film franchise called The Purge in which the government legalises all crime, including murder, for a 12-hour period every year.
One would be forgiven for thinking that right now Middlesbrough is experiencing its own permanent version of The Purge.
Additional reporting: Mark Branagan and Kevin Donald
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