A Single Punch On A Night Out Ended My Teenage Sons Life

A mother whose teenage son was killed by a single, brutal blow to the head in a nightclub toilet has revealed how an ordinary evening transcended into her worst nightmare in just a few hours – and says she’ll never forgive the man who killed him.

Speaking to The Daily Mail, Maxine Thompson-Curl, 60, from County Durham, says she had no idea that the ‘mundane’ conversation the mother-and-son shared as he left the family home in Burnopfield for a night out would be their last.

On September 4, 2010, Kristian had arranged to meet friends in Consett, on the outskirts of Newcastle upon Tyne, following his shift at a local working man’s club.

The family had been decorating that day, with Kristian helping his mother paint the hallway – when he left, there was a speck of paint on his footwear. She had shouted after him as he made for door: ‘Kristian! Don’t be back too late.’

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Hours later, a single punch would trigger a brain injury that would brutally cut his life short months later.

The mother-of-two recalls the moment her world came crashing down, when she answered the phone to be told Kristian had been struck after a brief altercation over a cigarette.

Kristian’s life ended in hospital ten months later, his body unable to recover from the trauma. The man convicted of taking his life, Mark Berry, served just nine months in jail for his crime.

She told the Daily Mail: ‘It was that split second that ruined my beautiful son’s life, and also my life forever. How can a punch do this?’

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‘People say “wrong place, wrong time”, but we should be able to go anywhere at any time, shouldn’t we? And it shouldn’t be the wrong place, ever.’

One-punch assaults are the focus of Punch, a play currently winning high praise in London’s West End and on Broadway.

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Written by James Graham, it is based on the book Right From Wrong by Jacob Dunne, who killed a trainee paramedic, James Hodgkinson, in Nottingham in 2011, with a single unprovoked punch, and went on to serve 14 months in prison.

The play follows the real-life story of how Hodgkinson’s parents, Joan Scourfield and David Hodgkinson, built a positive relationship with Dunne via arestorative justice project.

Dunne and his victim’s mother have frequently worked together to champion the power of forgiveness. Dunne went on to get a university degree and has made a success of his life, in part, he says because Joan Scourfield forgave him.

However, Maxine is clear that she does not share those feelings and, 15 years on from Kristian’s senseless death, said she will never forgive Mark Berry for changing the course of her life in the seconds it took to throw one punch.

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As Kristian had waited for his friends to finish their drinks at the K2 nightclub, he went to the loo, decision that would end his life.

Berry asked him for a cigarette; the teenager tried to explain he didn’t smoke but before he could, he was floored by the force of Berry’s single blow to the head.

She recounts her initial disbelief that anything serious was wrong, saying that when a family friend told her Kristian was on his way to hospital, she thought: ‘“Well, what’s he up to now? They’ve only been out an hour”, as you do, always blaming the kid for something silly.

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‘But then I was told it was something serious.’

The friend relayed that Kristian had suffered severe injuries and was being treated at Durham Hospital.

With her heart in her mouth, Maxine says she arrived to see her youngest son covered in wires on a hospital bed.

She says: ‘He’d been helping me decorate that day, he’d been painting the hall, and when he was lying on the bed, there was paint on the bottom of his foot and all I was thinking was “I’ll need to scrape that off”, it sounds silly.’

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Kristian was transferred to Newcastle hospital for emergency surgery; doctors told Maxine there was no brain activity and her son would need several procedures, including removing a part of his skull and his brain’s frontal lobe.

She says: ‘Kristian was beautiful. He was a footballer and a cricketer. He lit up the room when he came in, he had the most beautiful personality.

‘And there I was signing this paperwork to say that he was going to have his skull removed and he would never be the same again.’

‘He had a brilliant future ahead of him, he was so clever. He got 11 GCSEs, and he was in college, he was going to go to university.’

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There was a ray of hope a week later. Kristian emerged from the coma following the surgeries, leaving Maxine feeling ‘bloody ecstatic’.

She says: ‘We jumped around the room but the doctors said “Don’t take this as anything, it might just be the reaction”, but within days, he had headphones on, and he was listening to music, and he was strolling along.

‘The first time he looked at me, we went out and we were jumping around the car park, screaming and shouting, “He’s gonna be okay”.

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However, the brain injury had completely changed her son’s personality. After the intensive operations, Kristian was a far cry from the cheery teenager who had bounded out of the house to pick his friends up just one week earlier.

Maxine explains: ‘He was so inappropriate, his language was horrendous, and he just wasn’t what we’d had before, but I understood that was the bleed on his brain.’

Kristian was moved to a special unit in Newcastle and then came the news that left the family deeply confused, he was formally sectioned.

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‘He was with people who were there because they had mental health issues. But Kristian had a brain injury.’

After three months, Maxine moved Kristian to a hospital in Northampton but ten months after the shocking assault, he tragically passed away.

Berry was jailed for 28 months after admitting causing grievous bodily harm and was released after serving just nine months of his sentence.

Maxine, who now runs One Punch, a campaign group to educate people about one-punch assaults, said she was disgusted that someone could kill someone with their bare hands and not even serve a year in prison.

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She said that the attacker couldn’t even offer a reasonable explanation for his actions, simply telling the court that he’d had ‘a bad day’.

The grieving mother says: ‘The lad that did that to Kristian, he hit him because Kristian didn’t have a cigarette.

‘It’s just pathetic, and he’d said in the court at the sentencing, which my brother-in-law went to – I couldn’t face it, it was really important to me to focus on Kristian – that he’d had a bad week at work.

‘He’d gone out, got himself drunk, and was using drugs, and then he’d come into the toilet where Kristian was, and he wanted a cigarette, and my Kristian… his hands were down beside his side.’

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What does Maxine make of the success of the play Punch!?

She says she Maxine finds it hard to resonate with the play and its message, confessing she didn’t feel it was appropriate for Dunne to have profited from it.

She said she has not forgiven her son’s attacker and gets through the day by avoiding thinking of him at all.

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Speaking of the play, and the decision to bring the topic to the stage, she said: ‘It’s not taken seriously.

‘It’s certainly a different angle and if that mother gets peace from watching it then good on her.

‘Maybe she’s got peace – which I haven’t got. I’ve never had peace. I think the little bit of solace I do get is through One Punch and helping other families, because I can’t have Kristian die in vain.’

She added, of her son’s attacker: ‘I don’t give him any of my attention. I don’t give him anything or any energy because if I did, it wouldn’t be healthy.’

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While she misses her ‘beautiful son’ every day she likes to think about what he might be up to if he were still alive.

‘I think he would probably be travelling the world now.’

Following her son’s death, Maxine has campaigned fortougher sentences and a better understanding that fists can be just as dangerous as weapons.

The mother-of-two explained that the only solace she has is being able to constantly campaign on behalf of her son, and raising awareness of how devastating one punch crimes can be.

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She said: ‘Even if you kill somebody outright, it’s still just manslaughter, because it’s a one-punch, and they’ll say that it wasn’t intended but as soon as you raise your hand, there’s intention.

‘If you use your hand and make it into a fist, you’re going to hurt somebody no matter what.’