Dorothy Wright: a mother’s fight for justice ends

DOROTHY Wright last spoke to her son Mark the day before he died.

During the call, he told her that he had found another job and how he was looking forward to leaving Deeside Metal, where he was employed as a scrapyard worker.

“He was concerned that someone would get killed,” Dorothy remembered.

“He told me that serious safety risks were being taken and that he had been told by his manager that injuries were just part of the job.”

The next day, Dorothy and her husband Douglas were told that Mark had been involved in an explosion and there was no hope for his survival.

Dorothy said: “The death that Mark had so accurately predicted was his own.”

The Crown Prosecution Service decided there was insufficient evidence for a prosecution and it was an almost a four-year wait for an inquest.

Criminal charges were later brought, and then dropped, against the manager who had told him to crush the aerosols.

Feeling let down by the system, the grieving mother, formerly of Boughton Heath, Chester, threw herself into campaigning for stronger legislation to prevent deaths in the workplace with Families Against Corporate Killers (FACK).

“We were made to feel as if we are the criminals and not those who were responsible for my son’s death,” she said.

“We were even visited by police who told us we would face a charge of criminal harassment after we pinned flowers to the fence at Deeside Metal.”

The fight culminated in what she saw as a hollow victory when the companies involved, together with scrapyard manager Robert Roberts, were fined.

Speaking after the hearing, she said: “I feel betrayed and angry.

“We have been bashing our heads against a brick wall for five and a half years trying to get that wrong righted.

“It was partly done today by the judge, I think he indicated what we thought all along – that a fine is not a fitting penalty for taking a life and it never will be. I still feel very let down but the judge blamed the people who should be blamed.

“I feel that he outlined what should have been corporate manslaughter.

“But this is too little, much too late to change anything. All that can be said is that the system is finished with us and can inflict no further agony on my family.”

Dorothy still campaigns for safety at work. For more information, visit www.fack.org.uk.