A heartbroken mum is desperate for answers after her teenage son drowned at Salford Quays - and has warned people not to go swimming in open water this summer in fear of more tragic deaths.
Vicky Waugh's 16-year-old son Kalen was cooling off with friends at the popular spot among scores of others when he got into trouble last July. Almost a year on, the single parent said her life is on hold as she waits for an inquest - due to take place on July 17 - a year and a day after student Kalen died.
She said: "I just don’t understand how it happened. There was that many people in the water, I don’t understand how he’s got into danger without someone noticing and being able to get him."
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Vicky is angry that similar tragedies still happen each year - with at least 12 young people dying in rivers and reservoirs across the UK since May 1 already. She has called for the authorities to do more to warn the public about the dangers of open water swimming.
"They say that they’ve done things but if you have then why’s it still happening frequently?" she told the Mirror. "It’s not like it’s once in a blue moon, it’s every f***ing year."
Referring to young people getting into trouble while swimming in recent weeks, she added: "It's all I see on my newsfeed. Go and buy a massive swimming pool and put it in your garden. Have fun at home, you don’t need to be going into open waters.
"You need to remember that it’s not as safe as it looks."
Vicky, 33, who works for a taxi firm, said she raised Kalen alone from when he was a toddler. They lived with her brother - who did not wish to be named - in Eccles.
"He’d actually got himself dressed quite good considering he had no sense of colour matching, but this particular day he’d made a bit of an effort. He was all matching," she explained. "I said 'are you meeting a girl?'. Since then, I have found out he was showing off for someone."
That morning was the last time they spoke. Vicky had no idea Kalen would go swimming that afternoon. He didn't have any swimming gear with him.
At around 6.15pm a friend of Kalen's contacted Vicky's brother through Snapchat and told him the teenager had disappeared under the water and the police were looking for him. "My brother said 'We need to go to the Salford Quays'," she recalled, and they rushed to the scene, arriving at 6.28pm.
"I kind of knew it was serious from the second I got told something had happened. I just kept thinking 'Please don’t let it be Kalen, please don’t let it be Kalen,'" Vicky said. "It was him. He’d been in the water for a while at that point.
"There were people still in there even after they were looking for Kalen in the water. There were still kids jumping in while that was happening."
She said it was in a section where people can pay at the nearby sports centre to swim and described Kalen as a good swimmer. "You’re not going to see danger with all those people in there, you’ll just think 'Look, everyone else having fun,'" Vicky said.
"I’m hoping that when the inquest comes I get some answers, but I’m not feeling very positive. It had happened a year before too. It’s too regular and it’s not just there, it’s everywhere."
Kalen and his friends had been swimming all afternoon. He had stripped down to his undershorts, with Vicky being handed his tracksuit bottoms, phone and other belongings at the scene.
She learned those with him had got out of the water and Kalen had gone back in for a last dip when he disappeared. Vicky said she overheard the divers confirming his body was found around 20 minutes after she got there.
However, it was not recovered until the early hours of the next day. Vicky wasn't allowed beyond the cordon, but a sports centre worker who had finished their shift re-opened so she and others could sit inside.
At 9.30pm - still confused as to why Kalen's body wasn't being brought out - she went home to wait by the phone. Having had no sleep, the phone rang at 6.20am to say the recovery was complete.
At 10.30am she was collected by a police officer who drove her to the hospital. Her brother formally identified his nephew's body.
"It still hasn’t sunk in now, to be honest with you," Vicky said. In the months since, she has tried to speak to Kalen's friends about what happened.
"But I can’t listen," she said. "So when they start…if they try to tell me anything, I can’t listen so I don’t actually know all the details."
Kalen had been diagnosed with ADHD as a child and Vicky said she was so proud of what he achieved at school. "We haven’t got a big family, he was my only child and I brought him up alone. He had no siblings. It was just me and my brother at the house," she said.
Describing her son, she said: "Wild. He was just a live-wire. He was a good kid, he had a bit of a bad patch when my mum died when he was in second year of high school.
"We had a bad few years but he managed to pull it all back together for the last year of high school. He’d just done his exams, he’d got his college place. He’d just got a job. He was doing plastering with a friend of mine."
With the anniversary around the corner, she said she and her brother are "taking each day as it comes". She said: "It’s literally flown by, it feels like a month ago, if that. I don’t even know, the last year’s just been a blur."
"I just don’t want any other mums to have to go through it."
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