When seven-year-old Nicholas Green was killed in Italy, the decision by his parents, Reg and Maggie, to donate his organs, gave life to seven local people. Now Reg is backing a new NHS initiative to increase organ donation in Britain.
On the night his seven-year-old son was shot, Reg Green was driving his family through southern Italy towards their holiday apartment in Sicily. It was October 1994. Maggie, his wife, had just nodded off. The two children, Nicholas and Eleanor, four, were asleep in the back.
Reg felt the first tremor of anxiety as a car started to tail them closely. He thought it must be the police. But instead of overtaking, the car pulled alongside at speed as if taunting them to a race. Then they heard angry voices, the words indistinguishable, yelling at them to stop.
Seconds later, a bullet shattered the window where the children were sleeping. Terrified, Maggie swung round but the children seemed to be oblivious.
Then came a second explosion, which shattered the driver’s window.
“How that bullet missed us I will never know,” says Reg. He drove furiously on, trying to find lights, people, safety. It later emerged that their assailants had been planning a jewellery heist and mistook the Green’s rental car with its Rome licence plates for one that was delivering jewellery. “It disappeared back into the night.”
Without knowing that Nicholas had been injured, they stopped by an ambulance that was attending a road accident. “We pulled in and when the interior light came on, I saw that Nicholas’s hand was sticking out slightly and there was a trace of vomit on his chin. He was not moving. He had been hit in the back of the head by one of the bullets but he had not made a sound. In death, as in life, he was no trouble to us.”.. Continue Reading
