The dad of a 12-year-old boy who died during a swimming lesson 'knew he was dead' when he saw his son in an ambulance.
Oliver King started the day at 7am with a cuddle in his parents' room and a chat about his previous day before being dropped off at school.
But the excitement of trying out the new swimming pool which had been refurbished quickly turned to tragedy.
His heart stopped after a race during a swimming lesson at King David's High School and the youngster died of sudden arrhythmic death syndrome (SADS).
The Liverpool Echo reports that "tragedy struck him, his family and friends".
His father Mark remembers "everything as though it was yesterday" after his son was taken to hospital in Liverpool.
He arrived before the ambulance carrying his son and heard sirens.
The dad thought to himself: "Don't be our Oliver in that ambulance. If he's coming in on a blue light, that's trouble."
The 60-year-old watched 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, when the heart stops pumping blood and a person stops breathing 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.
Speaking about his son Mark added: "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."
Since the tragedy, he has travelled around the country, personally delivering every one of the 6,000 defibrillators the charity has distributed, including in every school in Merseyside.
The organisation 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.
Mark and the foundation met politicians and 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.
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 parents 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."
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.
