Lying in a hospital bed as medics tried to keep him comfortable in his final days, Alex Nash was convinced he was surrounded by soldiers trying to kill him.
It was a terrifying image he lived with for more than 20 years, ever since the moment he was shot while trying to save his teenage son’s life.
Alex survived the attack with life-changing physical injuries - but the biggest trauma was psychological.
His 19-year-old son William, known as Willie, was one of 13 unarmed people shot dead 50 years ago today when members of the British Army’s Parachute Regiment opened fire in Derry.
Infamously known as Bloody Sunday, the day marked one the darkest moments in The Troubles.
Last year, Northern Ireland’s authorities abandoned the prosecution of the only British soldier charged over the killings.
Now Alex’s daughter and Willie’s sister Kate, 72, fears she will die having never seen justice for her family.
Kate tells the Mirror: “We are still seeking justice, five decades on. It makes me angry - the whole thing was so unfair and so brutal.
“I am worried I am not going to see justice in my lifetime, just like my father didn’t. I am not afraid of dying, I am afraid of not seeing justice - and not just justice for my brother and my father, but for all the other victims who were killed and injured that day.
“My dad died 23 years ago this week, so it’s a very poignant week for me. He was 78, but he wanted to die for a really long time.
“It wasn’t a coincidence that it was a few days before the Bloody Sunday anniversary.
“He was in a lot of pain and he blamed himself. He still struggled to get dressed and put a coat on for a long time due to the injuries from the two bullet wounds, but his psychological injuries were worse and they only got worse as he got older.
“You could see the heartbreak in him. He used to go on long walks on his own so that we didn’t see him cry.
“For us, our father was always a very brave man because he tried to save Willie as bullets were flying around him. But he never got over it.
“He started to worry that everything he saw was a paratrooper - when he was in hospital he would say to me ‘don’t come back here’ because he thought the doctors were paratroopers. He was always really, really worried.”
Kate was 22 when Alex and Willie joined the civil rights march in Bogside, a predominantly Catholic area of the city, on January 30 1972.
Alex was one of 15 people wounded on the day, suffering bullet wounds as he tried to save his bleeding son as he died in his arms on the street.
Kate’s last memory of Willie was him standing at the crack of their front door “just having a bit of craic”.
Alex and Willie, who was the seventh of 13 children, were amongst tens of thousands of demonstrators marching against imprisonment without trial, known as internment.
It was organised by the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association, which had been campaigning for Catholic civil rights in Northern Ireland since its first march in 1968.
The irony of the savage event is that it led to a huge surge of IRA recruitment locally, worsening the region’s sectarian conflict.
Dock worker Willie was shot in the chest near a rubble barricade. Alex saw his son being killed and went to help him, before being shot himself.
He wasn’t able to attend his son’s funeral, as he was still recovering from his own injuries in hospital.
Widowed mum-of-one Kate, who still lives in Derry, remembers how her mother screamed for Willie “for an awful long time”.
Kate says: “She cried out on the step: ‘Willie, Willie, Willie!’ On a daily basis she would be howling Willie's name. The pain of that will always stand out in my head, I will always remember that.
“She died just seven years after Willie's death, when she was just 59. Her heart just gave in. I still think about Willie every day - the life he could have had, how many kids and grandkids he could have had.”
In a bid to channel her anger and find justice, Kate joined other victims’ families in founding The Bloody Sunday March Committee.
It came after the first public inquiry into the massacre, the now-discredited Widgery Report, exonerated the soldiers, claiming the paratroopers opened fire after being fired upon.
A new inquiry into the killings, launched by Tony Blair in 1998, took more than a decade to report back - the longest-running inquiry in British legal history at a cost of about £200m.
The Saville Inquiry found that none of the casualties on the day were posing a threat or doing anything that would justify their shooting, with then-Prime Minister David Cameron calling the killings "unjustified and unjustifiable".
In his report, Mark Saville said he was unable to say for certain who had shot Willie.
The families were given a glimmer of hope as prosecutors announced they would charge Soldier F, a former member of the Parachute Regiment, for the murders of James Wray and William McKinney, along with the attempted murders of Patrick O'Donnell, Joseph Friel, Joe Mahon and Michael Quinn.
But in 2021, it was announced Soldier F would not face trial, inflaming further sectarian tensions in the region.
John Kelly is still fighting for justice for his brother Michael 50 years on.
Michael, who was training to be a sewing machine mechanic, was just 17 when he went on his first - and last - civil rights march along with some friends.
He was shot in the stomach by a soldier couched 80 yards away.
Michael was carried to the safety of a house and died in an ambulance on the way to hospital.
John, who now works at the Museum of Free Derry, still treasures a 50-year-old Mars bar his mother gave him on the day he was gunned down.
Michael never got a chance to eat it.
“My mother never got over it,” John says.
“My parents were completely devastated by Michael’s death. My mother suffered terribly. She remembered nothing for five years and we thought we were going to lose her.”
John remembers his mother would visit Michael’s grave every day and would even take a blanket to “keep Michael warm”.
One of the most notorious killings of the day was of 41-year-old father-of-six Bernard McGuigan.
The factory worker and handyman was shot as he went to the aid of a dying Patrick Doherty while waving a white handkerchief.
In his report, Saville found there was "no doubt" Soldier F had shot an unarmed Bernard, known as Barney, along with the unarmed Patrick.
Barney’s family have barely spoken about his death, for fears of Loyalist repercussions, saying the “intimidation is real even after 50 years”.
Just this week, British Paratrooper Regiment flags were seen flying from lampposts in areas of Derry.
Barney’s nephew Terry tells the Mirror: "He was my favourite uncle and my life was blown apart when he died. Barney heard a man cry out and he went to comfort him, that’s why he was shot."
To mark the 50th anniversary, families will form a protest in Derry today as they continue to seek justice for the killings.
Kate adds: “I won’t give up, not until my dying day.”
The Bloody Sunday victims were: John ‘Jackie’ Duddy, 17, Patrick Doherty, 31, Michael McDaid, 20, William McKinney, 27, Michael Kelly, 17, Bernard ‘Barney’ McGuigan, 41, Gerald Donaghey, 17, Gerard McKinney, 35, James Wray, 22, Hugh Gilmour, 17, William 'Wilie' Nash, 10, John Young, 17, Kevin McElhinney, 17.
