'Tomorrow never came' - Talented young footballer commemorated in mural to highlight cardiac death
On an August morning in 2018 Jake Pickford's sister, Chloe, went to wake up her brother but she quickly discovered he'd passed away.
The 16-year-old from Abertysswg was just one week away from his GCSE results and had secured a place at his local college to study sports. He had dreamed of becoming a football coach.
A coroner concluded that Jake had died of natural causes, the result of sudden arrhythmic death syndrome.
The talented young footballer has now been commemorated in a mural in Cardiff in a bid by the British Heart Foundation Cymru to highlight the loss of young people to sudden cardiac death.
“Mum had recently gone back to work as nurse in Merthyr Tydfil. She was working a half day that day so it was just me in the house with my two brothers that morning", Chloe, 19, explained.
“As it was the summer holidays, Jake had stayed up late playing on his Xbox, so the next morning when he hadn’t woken up or come downstairs I really didn’t really give it muchthought. It wasn’t unusual.”
“Mum came home around lunchtime and I made a sandwich to take up to Jake, but as I soon as I went into his bedroom, I saw his arm was hanging over the side of the bed and it was a strange colour.
"I immediately knew there was something wrong and shouted for mum to come in."
She said, “As soon as Mum saw him I think she knew he was gone. I rang 999 and we shouted down to Alfie to stay downstairs – we didn’t want him to see what was going on."
The called handler told Chloe and her mum to find the nearest defibrillator. They knew there was one a short distance away at the village's working men's club, but when Chloe arrived there was no one there to let her in.
When she returned to the house, she and her mum began to start CPR on Jake. "It felt like a lifetime before the emergency services arrived, but it was probably just minutes", she said.
An inquest into Jake's death found that he died from natural causes. He had suffered sudden arrhythmic death syndrome (SADS).
A postmortem found there was no evidence that Jake had any underlying condition which might've lead to his death. His family say this left them with many unanswered questions.
According to the British Heart Foundation, more than 500 people in the UK die from SADS every year. That's 12 families, like Jakes, every week having to deal with the death of a loved one.
The syndrome describes when someone dies suddenly and unexpectedly from a cardiac arrest. The electrical impulses in the heart can go wrong and cause the heart to beat abnormally, this is called an arrhythmia and can bring on cardiac arrest.
The British Heart Foundation Cymru is hoping by commemorating young people through murals across the country, more people will be aware of the devastating effect these conditions can have on people.
The charity says that 1 in 5 people in Wales don't believe a heart condition can affect you if you are healthy and under 35.
“Six years on we are still really struggling as a family. It’s been particularly difficult for Mumand Dad because they just worry that the same thing could happen to me and Alfie.
“Jake and I were very close, despite fighting like cat and dog like siblings do! I really couldn’t wait for him to get older, so he could pass his driving test and we could go out in the car together. I looked forward to going out drinking and socialising with him when we were older", Chloe said.
"We’ll never be able to do that now. Jake would be 22 this November and I can’t help wondering what sort of young man he would have become and what he would have done with his life."
She explained, “We have all struggled with our mental health and we just really take each day one at a time and keep going. That’s all we can do. We find it really hard to plan for tomorrow, because for Jake, tomorrow never came.”
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