A father has told of the tragic moment his lost his beloved son at the tender age of 12. Oliver King from Childwall, Merseyside was a typical young boy who loved sports such as football and swimming.
One day back in 2011, he woke up and crept into his parents' room - excited for the school day ahead. But just mere hours later tragedy struck in an incident which would transform the lives of those closest to the happy and bubbly schoolboy.
Speaking about his wonderful son, his dad Mark, who dropped him to school that day, told the Echo: "He was just full of life. Everybody loved him. You'd only have to meet him once and he was like a ripple.
"He was absolutely beautiful, and he's a massive miss from that day to this." Oliver loved swimming and was excited to try out King David High School's refurbished swimming pool for the first time that day, but "tragedy struck him, his family and friends".
Oliver died from sudden arrhythmic death syndrome (SADS) when his heart stopped after a race during a school swimming lesson. Mark, sat in the same office chair he was in when the school called to say his son was being taken to Alder Hey, remembers "everything as though it was yesterday".
He arrived at the hospital before the ambulance carrying his son. He heard the sirens and thought to himself: "Don't be our Oliver in that ambulance. If he's coming in on a blue light, that's trouble."
The now-60-year-old from Childwall saw the paramedics take his son from the ambulance, and "kept telling him to come back to me". But, Mark said: "I knew then mate. I knew he was dead. His arms were over the trolley and he was lifeless. They took him into Alder Hey and they worked on him tirelessly that day for two hours, and we couldn't get him back.
"You send a fit and healthy boy to school - there's no safer place for him while we're out working - and this tragedy happens to him. So we looked into this condition, SADS, and I was horrified to read the government statistics saying that we lose 12 lives a week."
According to the British Heart Foundation, SADS is when a person dies suddenly and unexpectedly from an unexplained cardiac arrest, which is when the heart stops pumping blood, in turn stopping the person's breathing and starving their brain of oxygen. The charity said it affects 500 people every year in the UK.
Research shows using a defibrillator to give the heart an electric shock within three to five minutes of a cardiac arrest increases the chance of survival by over 40%. This means Oliver could have survived if one had been available, and the fact prompted his family to launch The Oliver King Foundation in January 2012 to campaign for defibrillators in every school.
Mark said: "I was angry because my Ollie wasn't the first one to die of a sudden cardiac arrest, whether it be in school or out of school. And I was wondering why it hadn't been done beforehand, why he wasn't protected, why our kids weren't protected in schools, indeed why the wider public aren't protected."
Since then, he's travelled around the country, personally delivering every one of the 6,000 defibrillators the charity has distributed, including in every school in Merseyside. The Oliver King Foundation has trained 135,000 people in how to use them, and their efforts have saved 65 lives, the latest one being a teacher last Friday, according to Mark.
After meeting with then-Education Secretary and current Chancellor, Nadhim Zahawi, Mark and the Oliver King Foundation convinced the government to install defibrillators in every state-funded school in England by the the end of the 2022/2023 academic year, roughly 12 months away. Laughing, Mark said: "I think what shut the government up is I threatened to become an MP, so I think they've said, we'd better let him have what he wants'.
"The feeling is absolutely fantastic. It's the culmination of 11 years of hard work all coming together. All of a sudden, it's just all fell into place. It's unbelievable. I thought we were going to be campaigning for a lot longer, to be honest.
"What's kept us going is knowing that when we get this far, we'll save a lot more lives than we already have saved with the foundation, you know. The Oliver King Foundation is representing each parent around the country because I don't want any other parents to go through what we went through on March 2, 2011."
The King family couldn't have got through it without the support of the local community who rallied around them, like people from King David High School who delivered food parcels to the house after Oliver died. Mark said: "You don't get any kinder people than Liverpool people."
He paid special thanks to former Mayor of Liverpool Joe Anderson, who "started the ball rolling for the foundation", and to former Liverpool FC player Jamie Carragher who backs the campaign and said a man's life was saved by a defibrillator the foundation placed in his gym, and to Garston and Halewood MP, Maria Eagle, who helped the charity meet MPs in London.
Once the rollout of defibrillators in English state schools is complete, Mark hopes to set up a centre where kids can get an electrocardiogram (ECG) to check the heart's rhythm and electrical activity, and test for SADS. He said people who've suffered heart attacks or had pacemakers fitted will be able to go there to exercise, eat and mix with people in similar situations, thereby keeping them physically and mentally healthy.
