Madness and Horror In Merseyside
Liverpool FC's championship parade was closed out by a driver ploughing over dozens of supporters celebrating—and hit very close to home for me.
Sunday afternoon, following their 1-1 draw with Crystal Palace, Liverpool FC (otherwise known as the Reds, or LFC) clinched their second English Premier League championship in five seasons. The Premier League is one of the foremost football leagues in the world, and LFC is one of the most iconic football teams. I could go off on all the reasons that this was, to re-use Joe Biden’s phrase on Obamacare, a “big fucking deal,” but the one that mattered to everyone in Liverpool was that, unlike 2020, this championship could be celebrated together, not in an empty stadium.
I’ve been following LFC for a bit short of a decade now, ever since my wife’s best friend, Kerry, introduced us to them. It didn’t take me too long to become hooked, and I now own all sorts of Liverpool gear (scarves, hoodie, t-shirts, four jerseys). I was in my living room, drinking and cheering and watching with unrestrained joy because you could hear the crowd roaring and singing the whole match and afterwards. It’s a city that lives and dies by LFC and its neighboring rivals, Everton (their stadiums are less than a mile apart—named after adjacent neighborhoods, even). An estimated 1.5 million fans, including those like Kerry and her husband, who flew from Central America to Liverpool to be present for the celebrations Sunday and Monday, turned out on Monday for the victory parade.
Look at that photo and tell me this wasn’t a big deal. There may be fireworks by the city, but there were a ton of Scousers on the streets with smoke bombs and flares. This photo really caught my eye.
It was a day of singing and happiness, children with parents, friends meeting up, a city delighted that, unlike 2020, they could well and truly celebrate the most important championship for football in the United Kingdom.
And then, at the very end, tragedy struck. A crossover SUV driven by Paul Doyle, a 53-year-old IT professional from the West Derby neighborhood of Liverpool, began crashing into people along Water St near the Mersey River. Doyle had gained access via a removed barricade, tailgating an ambulance sent to help a heart attack victim in the crowd, and then plowed into the crowds. His vehicle briefly paused and was surrounded by irate people, who attempted to smash their way into the vehicle and stop him, at which point Doyle pulled the SUV back and drove headfirst into even more people. By the time he finished, several dozen people sustained various injuries and a family of four were trapped underneath his vehicle.
Doyle has been charged with numerous crimes, including operating under the influence of drugs, which tells us the how. We have yet to learn the why.
My first thoughts upon learning of this incident were the wellbeing of Kerry and her husband, especially when we were unable to reach them. As I found out the next day, they had no reception for hours after the incident and were unable to reply to our worried texts. They had met up with friends that came in from Florida to celebrate, and after the parade had gone past their location, they split off to head back to their respective lodgings. The Floridians were on Water St, and narrowly avoided being hit by Doyle’s vehicular rampage. Kerry and her husband were well away from it, but were soon engulfed by the wave of people running away from the scene.
This is not the first, nor will it be the last time, that people near and dear to me are in the crosshairs of violence. My cousins live adjacent to Michigan State University, with one a student there (the other hadn’t started yet) and had to lock themselves inside the house when there was a shooter roaming through the campus two years ago. A college friend of mine is a professor at MSU and had to do the same. Last summer, there was a mass shooting very near to our home at a children’s splash pad. Every time, there’s the same feeling of sickness and dread. The worries about what-if. The inability to reach someone you care about that was present amplifies all of those feelings.
There’s no good answer for this. Changes will be made by police in the future, as is usually the case, and the next parade will be more secured. Cars are universal and can’t be restricted in a way that prevents their usage in such a manner—unlike guns, knives or any other deadly weapons that are designed for killing. It doesn’t make it any less painful for everyone injured, or who watched people get run over by a drugged-out man. We can only hope that eventually, the good memories of that day, the city uniting around its favored lads from LFC hoisting a championship, matching Manchester United FC with twenty English top-flight football championships won, will win out over the horror of this past Monday in Merseyside.