'I had 37 missed calls and then I just fell on the floor' - Mother of teen killed at party
Helen Ryall tells ITV News she's been "left with nightmares" since losing her son Mikey.
The mother of a teenage boy who was stabbed to death at a party in Bath has shared her heartbreaking memory of the moment she found out her son had been killed.
Mikey, who was from Kingswood near Bristol, was stabbed in the neck with a large zombie knife during a fight which broke out at the party on 10 June 2023.
Three teenagers have been found guilty of killing him.
After a five-and-a-half week trial at Bristol Crown Court, jurors found one boy guilty of murder and the other two boys guilty of manslaughter.
Hayley Ryall, Mikey Roynon's mother, was at a work ball in Birmingham on a Saturday night in June last year when she went to check her phone.
There were 37 missed calls, mostly from her son, Mikey.
But when she called him back his friends picked up instead and said he had been stabbed.
They said he was "already gone".
Hayley and her mother, who was also at the ball, travelled back to Bristol with a friend.
She says she had hoped Mikey was simply injured, but when she was diverted to the scene in Bath, she knew his friends had been telling her the truth.
“I didn’t know what to do", Hayley told ITV News.
"I think I just fell on the floor. You don’t feel like you live in the real world.
"I’ve been left with nightmares most nights. The only way to deal with it, is you hope it is going to go back to normal. I know it’s not, but I just miss him.”
Hayley told ITV News about the gaping hole he has left in her family’s life and her determination to not let others suffer in the same way.
She said: “I cannot believe kids carry these (zombie) knives around with them. Where do they get them from? We can’t keep doing this.
"Kids are killing kids. Something has to change. Every time it happens again, I just think their poor mother, some other family has to go through this again.
“I’d like to see tougher sentences for people carrying knives and stop and search should be used more, it might just make people think twice about carrying a weapon.”
Mikey has been described as a kind, popular and fearless teenager who loved spending time with his friends and who had recently started rapping.
He died before he could collect his GCSEs which he went on to pass.
Hayley has since set up the charity Mikey’s World and has fundraised money to purchase more than a hundred bleed kits for the community and provide training for youngsters in how to use them.
She said: “If we can get kids to see - if you choose to do this to somebody, someone could die in three minutes and what you need to do to save them, then maybe it will encourage kids not to carry knives.”
Hayley said Mikey was never embarrassed to share his feelings, and the last time they spoke it was simply to say "I love you".
She cherishes that moment and the fact she got to say those words back to him.
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