Crystal Owen still doesn’t know what possessed her 17-year-old son to go on a camping trip to Snowdonia in darkest, dampest November.
She didn’t have any idea that Harvey – so clever but so heartbreakingly clueless in that way of so many teenage boys – was even going camping and despairs of how hopelessly ill-prepared he was. ‘He lied to me, as teenagers do when they think their mothers are going to say ‘no’,’ she says.
Nor did she know he had accepted, unquestioningly, a lift from a fellow teen who had only passed his driving test just months previously and who had limited experience on twisty, mountainous roads. ‘No way would I have let him get in that car,’ says Crystal.
She weeps, in pain and frustration, as she remembers the last time she saw her boy, whom she describes as ‘just the perfect son’.
‘He came downstairs with this tiny bag. You couldn’t even have called it a rucksack. It was a tatty thing he’d bought on Vinted for a tenner. He’d thrown a few things in it – hair gel and a notebook he’d been writing poetry in. He wasn’t even dressed for the outdoors. He had a thin coat on and slippy shoes.’
That teenagers, even those on the cusp of adulthood, can be so ‘dopey’ (her word) was actually something Crystal would cling to in the hours and days that followed.
Crystal Owen, with Harvey, whose friend Hugo, 18, lost control of the car the boys were in
Harvey grew up to love learning and poetry says grieving mum Crystal
She describes her boy as ‘just the perfect son’
Crystal says he was ‘book smart’ but he ‘had no sense of danger’
Almost two days after her last contact with Harvey and a full day after he and his three friends had been reported missing, sparking a massive search and rescue operation, she and Harvey’s stepdad, Pete, were on those often-treacherous Welsh mountain roads themselves, staring into the ravines, living every mother’s worst nightmare. ‘The police had told us not to go to Snowdonia to join the search,’ she recalls. ‘They said they needed us at home, near the phone.
‘On the first night, I followed that advice, but after that I couldn’t. We left at first light on the Tuesday. I was hysterical, frantic. We were running up to random walkers, saying ‘have you seen our boy?’, showing them photos.’ The police explained that their priority was to locate the car, so they’d been concentrating on car parks near camping areas. Then a sighting came in, via X (formerly Twitter). ‘Someone said they’d seen a group of lads parked up at the side of the road, dragging something that could have been a tent. I remember thinking, ‘That’s it! This is what’s happened.
‘They are so dopey they’ve just pulled up somewhere, off the beaten track. They’ve just got lost. They are not dead in a ditch. It gave me hope.’
False hope, as it turned out. Because her worst fears were confirmed just a few hours later when the Ford Fiesta the teenagers had been travelling in was indeed pulled from a flooded ditch.
An inquest earlier this month confirmed that Harvey and his friends Hugo Morris, 18, Wilf Fitchett, 17, and Jevon Hirst, 16, had drowned soon after impact. The weather, although grim, had not been a factor, but driver experience – or lack thereof – had been.
Harvey loved to have friends round at home in Shrewsbury and play the guitar
Crystal relived her worst nightmare joining the search and rescue operation in Snowdonia after Harvey and his three friends were reported missing. ‘I was hysterical, frantic,’ she says
Harvey died after the Ford Fiesta he was travelling in with three friends ended up in a flooded ditch. The teenagers drowned soon after impact, an inquest earlier this month confirmed
Friends Jevon Hirst, 16, left, and Wilf Fitchett, 17, right, were also killed in the accident
Driver Hugo, whom Crystal had never met (‘Harvey had never mentioned him. I didn’t even know he existed’), had passed his driving test six months earlier, and the inquest heard he probably lost control when he approached a bend ‘a little bit too quickly and understeered’.
It is another tragedy that underlines the dangers of a carload of young friends on a rural road, with a novice at the wheel. The senior coroner for north-west Wales, Kate Robertson, flagged up the fact that this was a too common scenario, saying she would write to the Department for Transport and the DVLA to raise concerns that deaths could continue while ‘young, newly-qualified drivers are permitted to carry passengers’.
Amid the tears of that day, there was relief that the coroner spoke out, because Crystal has been trying to do so for months, campaigning for a change in the law.
Other countries, such as Canada, Australia, New Zealand and some US states, have adopted the so-called Graduated Licensing System, where new drivers are restricted both in the speed they can drive at and in the number of passengers they can carry. The moves have led to reductions in deaths of up to 40 per cent.
‘I hadn’t heard of such a thing,’ says Crystal. ‘It was first mentioned to me about six weeks after Harvey died. I hadn’t been able to get out of bed before then, apart from to go to the church for the funeral. I felt sick when I discovered that it has been raised in our Parliament over and over again – the last time just months before Harvey died.
Hugo Morris, 18, was driving the car and had passed his test just six months earlier and probably lost control when he approached a bend ‘a little too quickly’, an inquest heard
‘Yet nothing has happened. We put all this emphasis on tackling knife crime and gun crime but the biggest threat to our children is them stepping into a car with their friend at the wheel.’
In the 11 months since Harvey died, Crystal has become a reluctant expert on the dangers, part of a campaigning group Forget-me-not Families Uniting which now has 168 members – all of whom have lost someone in a crash where a recently qualified driver was at the wheel.
The statistics are indeed terrifying. Drivers in the 17 to 24 age bracket are involved in 24 per cent of all collisions resulting in death and injury. Rural roads are the most perilous. Inexperienced drivers in a car with peers of a similar age are four times more likely to be involved in an accident than those driving alone. Organisations such as the AA support a change to existing laws.
‘It is too late for Harvey,’ she says. ‘But it is not too late to stop other families living this hell.’
At the family home in Shrewsbury, the sense of what has been lost is overwhelming. Harvey, who had left just left school and enrolled at college, was an avid reader, an ‘old soul’ who was curious about the world (‘he would start most dinner times with ‘did you know…?’, telling us random facts he had learned’).
His poetry book was too water-damaged to be saved, but the police did recover another notebook, full of doodles and scribbles, which Crystal managed to dry out. She shows me a page where Harvey had noted down a line from The Beatles song Strawberry Fields Forever. ‘Living is easy with eyes closed/Misunderstanding all you see.’
We chat about how teenage boys can be so bright and yet…
‘Harvey was book smart but he had no common sense,’ she says, bluntly. ‘He had no sense of danger. He hadn’t yet learned to drive himself, no interest.
‘He went everywhere on his pushbike but even that put the fear of God into me. I’d meet him out on the road with no helmet on – even though he owned three. I’d shout out the car window ‘are you trying to get yourself killed?’. It was one of my phrases to him.
‘But this is my point. I don’t think Harvey was unusual in that. It’s a scientific fact that at that age their brains are not fully formed. They make decisions that you or I wouldn’t make. That’s why we have to protect them.’
Crystal runs a bakery and has three other children, Yasmin, 20, Sophia, five, and Olivia, three. Yasmin and Harvey (‘who were more like twins’) were from her first marriage, when she was only in her 20s herself.
Police at the scene of the accident in November 2023
‘As a newly qualified driver, I remember clipping the back of my wing mirror then accidentally driving up a one-way street. It really scared me and I chose not to take passengers for a long time after that. I would never drive with the little ones for a good year or so after.’
She was quite a protective mother, she reckons, but ‘Harvey made it quite easy to protect him, to a point. He wasn’t one of those kids who would want to go out and you’d never know where they were. He hated sleepovers. If anything, our house was where he and all his friends congregated, to play guitar, hang out.’
After starting college Harvey got a part-time job at a pizza restaurant. It was a time of change with new challenges – and new friends.
‘Hugo was at his college but he never once mentioned him. He’d known Jev and Wilf for years.’
She would never have said Harvey was the secretive type but at the same time ‘he was still a teenage boy’. She still torments herself that about a month before the fateful trip, she caught him smoking and grounded him for a fortnight. She sobs about this now: ‘If I’d let it go, been less strict, maybe he wouldn’t have felt he had to lie to me about the camping trip.’
Yet he did lie. Harvey told his mum, quite breezily, that he was planning to go away with Jev and Wilf the following weekend. There was a convincing story about going to stay with Jev’s grandfather in Wales (it was partly true; there was an overnight stay here planned). Jev’s dad would drive (untrue) and the boys would get the train home. ‘I should have checked with Jev’s dad. Every day, I will regret I didn’t check.’
She waved him off and the timeline from here provides its own horror. Harvey arrived safely in Harlech and spent the Saturday evening with Jev’s grandfather. He sent his mother a text to say all was well. At 11am on Sunday, they set out for Snowdonia National Park, where they planned to camp that night.
All the other parents, Crystal later discovered, were aware of the camping part. She received a text from Harvey around midday, including a scenic picture of the view from Jev’s grandfather’s house. There was nothing to worry about. Then… silence.
‘When it got to 7pm and he hadn’t checked in, I was worried.’ Her family told her to stop being paranoid. ‘I called my daughter, at university, and she said, ‘Mum, stop it. He’s 17. He’s out with his mates. They’ll just have no mobile reception. It’s Wales!’
‘My messages to him weren’t going through but I was reassured when people kept telling me about the awful reception in the area. Pete kept saying, ‘if there was anything wrong, you’d have heard. There are adults there. They have landlines’.’
Into Monday – the day the boys were due back. At work, Jev’s mother called her (‘she called the shop. We didn’t actually know each other well enough to have mobile numbers’) to ask if she’d heard from Harvey. Only then did alarm bells sound. ‘She said the word ‘camping’. I said, ‘what?’.’ By 3.10pm, the police had been called and the search was underway. ‘You keep thinking, ‘don’t panic. It’s just boys being boys’.’
Monday night was ‘hell on earth’. In the early hours of Tuesday – as the boys’ disappearance was leading national news headlines – Pete drove them to Wales, against police wishes. ‘I was beside myself,’ Crystal admits.
Every reported sighting on social media kept hope alive but around 10am they received a call from their police liaison officer asking them to make their way to Bangor Police Station. A car had been found. There was no more information. ‘I remember looking at my hands and they’d gone white and I had a pins-and-needles sensation. It felt like my hands weren’t attached to my body.’
Devastated Crystal, pictured at the inquest earlier this month, has been campaigning for a change in the law around newly qualified drivers offering lifts. ‘It is too late for Harvey,’ she says. ‘But it is not too late to stop other families living this hell’
They sat in reception. ‘I remember the officers on the desk just going about their business, chatting, laughing. I thought, ‘No one would be laughing if the worst had happened. It must be OK’.’ After ten minutes, they were shown into a room where an officer told them they had found four bodies. Crystal pauses. ‘I can’t remember much more but Pete says that I was just howling, saying, over and over, ‘it can’t be him. It can’t be him’.’
She was in no state to identify Harvey’s body and never saw him in his coffin (‘I couldn’t, even though I picked his clothes and told them how to part his hair’). She has still to collect his ashes. ‘I know I should but that would make the reality more real.’
She is aware there are three other families living this hell. It would be nice to think they have comforted each other but Crystal says there has been no contact.
After the inquest, Wilf’s mother Heather Sanderson gave a statement which suggested a very different take on this terrible tragedy. ‘We gave Wilf permission to go because we believed that the driver had passed his driving test, which he had and we were more than happy,’ she said. ‘We had done our research and I think we would make the decision again, not knowing the outcome. I don’t think our decision was flawed.’
Crystal sympathises yet firmly believes that these decisions should not be in the hands of parents. ‘No one wants to be the parent who says ‘no’ but the law could make it that they don’t have to. It could and should be illegal for a teenager to get in that car.’
And what of her feelings towards Hugo, whom she never met, and never will? ‘I have huge sympathy for his family but you cannot get around the fact that he lost control of that car. The law needs to be changed to protect these young drivers too. The law could have saved that family’s son too.’
To support Crystal’s campaign for a change in the law concerning new drivers, sign her petition at: chng.it/fFZSWRf45T