Hours after his mother was killed in a horrific car crash on December 10, 2020, Gus Atkinson sat in his childhood bedroom beside his father, Ed.
For a while, there was silence. Then the 22-year-old Gus reached for a cricket ball.
He weighed the leather in his hand, looked at his father and said: ‘I want to bowl for England, I want to take five wickets and I want to hold the ball up and say: “Thanks, Mum.”’
The previous evening, Caroline Atkinson had been killed when the Uber she was travelling in was hit by a car travelling at 63mph on Fulham Palace Road in west London – where the speed limit was just 30mph.
Youssef Berouain climbed out of his wrecked £70,000 Audi Q7 and was arrested by police, who later reported that he stank of cannabis. The then-27-year-old Berouain refused to provide a sample, meaning we’ll never know what concoction of drugs and drink might have prompted him to drive with such fatal abandon.
What we do know is that two weeks before Christmas, that year, a 55-year-old mother of three lost her life thanks to what Mr Justice Hehir would go on to describe as Berouain’s ‘criminal stupidity and selfishness’.
A young Gus Atkinson stands beside his beloved mother Caroline – who was killed by a speeding former Eastenders actor while she took an Uber in 2020
It was Caroline Atkinson who had fostered her eldest son’s dream of playing professional cricket. It was she who had driven him every Wednesday evening from Bradfield, his Berkshire boarding school synonymous with sport, to cricket practice in Guildford. In the words of one family friend speaking exclusively to the Mail this month: ‘Caroline was the force of nature behind her son’s sporting success.’
And then, this summer, three and a half years after Caroline’s untimely passing, Gus Atkinson achieved the dream he and his beloved mother had worked so hard to achieve.
It was July 10 and a muggy day at Lord’s cricket ground in north London. Before play, Atkinson had been presented with a blue England Test cap marking his debut appearance – a symbol of having reached the pinnacle of the professional game.
As vice-captain Ollie Pope – Atkinson’s teammate and friend of 17 years – handed it over, he echoed the thoughts of many and said, with a lump in his throat: ‘Your mum would be so proud.’
Four hours later, Gus was walking off the field to a standing ovation from the 31,000 spectators packed into the Home of Cricket, having taken seven wickets in the first innings.
He finished the match with 12 wickets and the best bowling figures by an England Test debutant for 134 years.
A new star of the sport had been born.
On July 26 this year, the day killer Youssef Berouain was sentenced to eight and a half years in prison, Gus Atkinson made his second Test appearance for England
Two weeks later, on July 26, Berouain was finally sentenced to eight and a half years in prison for causing Caroline’s death. The Atkinson family’s four-year battle for justice was over. It was the same day Gus walked out to make his second Test appearance for England.
But why did it take so long to hold the man who was responsible for Caroline’s death to account? The story begins on that rainy night in December 2020.
Caroline had gone out for Christmas drinks with her friend, Penelope Seguss. The pair were looking forward to letting their hair down with friends after months of Covid lockdowns.
They left a property on Niton Street in Fulham – where homes sell for as much as £3million – just after 10.20pm and stood for a short while on the pavement while waiting for an Uber to take them home to Wandsworth.
A few minutes later, Uber driver Shafiqullah Saied arrived in his Toyota Prius and the women jumped in the back seats, pulling the belts across their laps.
Mr Saied turned the car around and crawled up to the junction that connects Niton Street with Fulham Palace Road, where the speed limit rises from 20mph to 30mph.
Saied looked both ways before edging out to get a better view of the right-hand turn. He was planning to drive to Putney Bridge; the traffic would be OK at this time of night and the journey shouldn’t have taken more than 15 minutes. The clock on the dashboard flickered to 10:36pm.
Court reports show Mr Saied waited an unusually long time at the junction. Perhaps he didn’t want to take any risks in the wet weather. Finally, a car coming from the right slowed and flashed its lights, giving him space to cross the carriageway and join the eastbound traffic.
He lifted his foot off the brake and gently pulled the steering wheel down to the right. Mr Saied, Ms Seguss and Caroline had just enough time to see an Audi Q7 travelling at speed towards them from the left. Its driver swerved, but it was too late. The cars collided in an explosion of noise, metal howling against metal, shrapnel cartwheeling across the tarmac.
The Audi – a two and a half tonne SUV – had hit the Prius on the rear passenger side. Mr Saied was unhurt, but the scene in the back of his car was like something from a warzone.
Berouain fled to the US after his lethal actions, and was extradited back to the UK last year. He pleaded guilty to causing death and serious injury by dangerous driving
Ms Seguss, covered in glass from the rear window, couldn’t move. She would later find that she’d shattered her pelvis and hip, broken her femur and had also suffered damage to internal organs. She would spend three weeks in hospital, undergoing numerous surgeries before spending a further six weeks in a rehabilitation clinic.
Even now, almost four years on, she has extensive physical and psychological scars. She remains in near-constant pain. ‘Every time I walk,’ she told the court earlier this year, ‘I am reminded of that night.’
An even worse fate befell Caroline.
In the immediate aftermath of the crash, adrenaline coursing through her veins, Caroline had remained conscious long enough to hear the sound of an ambulance siren roaring towards her. But shortly after the emergency services arrived, she passed out. She was rushed to hospital but died two hours later, having suffered a ruptured aorta and lacerated liver.
At the time of her death, Gus was 22; his older sister, Izzie, was 24 and their youngest sibling, Barnaby, had just left school aged 18.
The lethal crash was the result of reprehensibly irresponsible driving on the behalf of the man behind the wheel of the flash Audi: jobbing actor Youssef Berouain.
He was arrested at the scene. According to court documents, one police officer ‘observed a strong smell of cannabis coming from Berouain’s person’, while another described his behaviour as ‘erratic’.
He was duly hauled off to Hammersmith Police Station and at 4.30am – more than four hours after Caroline had died – was asked to provide blood and urine samples. Berouain contemptuously refused before insisting to officers that he had been driving at between 20 and 30mph – a claim he would continue to make years later, despite an investigation subsequently proving he was travelling at a quite unbelievable 63mph. He was released on bail that night.
A month later, on January 28, 2021, Berouain fled the country, departing from Heathrow Airport to Dubai before making it to the US later that year. Astonishingly, his absconding wasn’t discovered by police a full seven months later when an officer turned up to his UK address to serve him charge papers for failing to provide a sample the night of his arrest.
UK authorities contacted their US counterparts requesting Berouain be extradited. In July 2023, American law enforcement tracked him down to an address in Los Angeles, using details provided to the state of California on a driver’s licence application.
When officers arrived at the address, Berouain was nowhere to be seen. The landlord revealed he hadn’t paid rent for a year. However, they did have a mobile phone number which they were all too happy to hand over.
Berouain, circled, played teenage gang member Tayo in eight episodes of Eastenders
On July 20, Berouain was finally apprehended – two and a half years after Caroline’s death. He was extradited in September and pleaded guilty to causing death and serious injury by dangerous driving at Southwark Crown Court on June 14 this year.
The police’s investigation found that Berouain, whose most notable role was playing a gangland thug in EastEnders, was more than 300 feet away when Mr Saied made his ill-fated turn out of Niton Street. If Berouain had been travelling at the speed limit, as he had falsely claimed, Mr Saied would have had an ample 8.7 seconds to complete his turn. As it was, he had less than half that time.
Berouain began to brake when he was 70 yards from the Prius. But at 63mph, the Audi’s stopping distance was 75 yards. The writing was already on the wall – Berouain slammed into the back of the Prius while still travelling at 47mph.
CCTV footage showed that in the moments before the crash, Berouain had been accelerating quickly, even using a bus lane to undertake other vehicles.
In his sentencing remarks, Mr Justice Hehir described Caroline Atkinson as ‘a formidable woman, fiercely devoted to her children and who stood up for what was right’.
Now 31, Berouain – who has a child in the US – will serve at least half of his sentence before he is eligible for release. The Mail contacted his acting representatives, BWH Agency, and asked whether it was still associated with the disgraced bit-part performer. It refused to comment.
It is important to remember that behind this appalling tragedy is a story of remarkable resilience.
Gus Atkinson suffered the loss of his biggest supporter and the woman who loved and cared for him like no one else. Such a loss would have brought many a fledgling career to a paralysing and premature finish. But for Atkinson, strikingly, it has been the fire that has propelled him from emerging young pro to genuine world-beater.
‘My mum pushed me forward almost behind my back,’ Gus said recently. ‘She’d get in touch with Surrey [his county team] and made sure I was still in the loop when perhaps I might have been falling behind the others.
‘Once she passed away my career could have gone one or two ways and I wanted to take it in the direction she would have wanted. And that I wanted as well.’
On the evening his mum died, Gus Atkinson told his father: ‘I want to bowl for England, I want to take five wickets and I want to hold the ball up and say: “Thanks, Mum”‘
Even Gus’s father, Ed, who split from Caroline in 2010 and left the family to go and live in the UAE, admitted earlier this year that Gus’s success was ‘the fulfilment of a lot of sacrifices Caroline made’.
She would have been immeasurably proud of her son, but she is not the only one. For Atkinson’s dauntless spirit – both on and off the field of play – has filled cricket-lovers across the nation with pride. Notably, he scored a near-perfect maiden Test century at the end of last month, cementing his status as a potential all-rounder in the mold of other England favorites Ian Botham and Freddie Flintoff.
How far Atkinson now goes in the game is anyone’s guess. As a youngster, he suffered a series of stress fractures in his back – an injury that can easily end a fast bowler’s career.
But what is for certain is that every milestone Atkinson achieves, he will hold a cricket ball in his hand, look up to the sky and say quietly to himself: ‘Thanks, Mum.’