Tank Slap - Motorcycle Forum

The first and possibly the worst masacre ever to occur in this country took place in Hungerford.

19th of August 1987 and Michael Ryan went on the rampage shooting anyoneand everyone at random, including my colleague and friend Roger Brereton, a fellow traffic cop working out of the Newbury office of Southern Traffic Area (STA) of Thames Vally, and responded to the orignal call because having served at Hungerford, he knew the area and had the equipment to get him there quickly to support.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hungerford_massacre" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

I along with my fellow traffic cop colleagues were called down from both Readng and Taplow (the other 2 STA bases) and what we saw I can still remember vividly as if it was yesterday.

In all my years in the service and all the fatal crashes and dead bodies I dealt with, Hungerford was the only incident that had what I would describe as a profound affect on me.

Anyway, I raise my glass to Roger and everyone else that lost their life that day.

Gosh yes - was that really 30 years ago

Terrible terrible thing.

All plod (current and retired) have my admiration for what you do / did tbh.

RIP all

Sad sequence of events that day. Why he insisted on taking other peoples lives is a mystery.

I'm sorry to hear you lost a friend and a colleague that day. That can never be easy to deal with.

The feeling of disbelief I had then about the Hungerford massacre hasn't changed, in fact the frequency of similar events elsewhere in the world has added to that disbelief, how anyone could do something like that is still utterly beyond my understanding.

I feel for anyone that has lost friends, family or colleagues in any of the attacks that seemed to start with Hungerford, especially the Police who are quite literally putting themselves in the firing line at times for us.

This was Rogers car. (we had personal issue back in those days) There were something like 40 points of entry and 20 points of exit.

It wasn't just all the bullet holes, but you can imagine the mess inside as well.

Anyway, the insurance company wanted to put it back into service.

Newbury refused to have it back, so the insurers said it could go to Reading. We said No way, so then Taplow were told they could have it.

Anyway, they tried every base in Thames Valley (bear in mind we all knoew each other across the 3 counties so word soon spread) and eventually it got to Newport Pagnell.

One of the crews said, "No problem, bring it here and we will use it, and the first time it goes out on the road, it will be put straight into a bridge on the Motorway!"

Surprisingly, we never saw that car again

Look at all the rounds that went into that car!! Had to be semi-auto for all that damage.

A prayer for your friend.