When Leah Bridge gave birth to her second son Ebon, it should have been one of the happiest days of her life. He arrived back in July 2023, at their home.
As his cries filled the room, Leah couldn’t look at him. She was terrified of what she might see – and whether she would see her late son Albie looking back at her. Leah was worried Ebon would be the spit of his sibling. The day Albie Speakman died will forever be remembered by those who loved him. The tragedy still weighs heavily on his loved ones as they struggle to rebuild their lives.
Leah, speaking to the Manchester Evening News, says she is trapped in a loop of grief, reliving Saturday, July 16, 2022 over and over. “It just feels like it happened yesterday,” the 31-year-old said as she broke down in tears. “It feels like I’ve stood still in time and I don’t go anywhere. I don’t move forward in my mind. I haven’t moved on anywhere from it. I think ‘what might he have seen? What might he have said? Was he scared? I don’t know because I wasn’t there.
“There’s not a day where I don’t think about it. I’m still there and I have to be without him now forever.” Albie was just three-years-old when he was hit by a defective telehandler driven by his dad Neil Speakman – Leah’s ex-partner – at his farm in Bury.
The toddler would stay with the 39-year-old on alternate weekends. Leah would always drop him off at the end of the lane. Leah met Speakman at the entrance to the farm at around 9am. Speakman took Albie to run errands before returning to the farm at 11.45am. Speakman got on with chores.
As his dad climbed onto a telehandler and moved bags of woodchip around, Albie played in the garden, throwing sticks into the air for the dogs. Speakman drove forward, dropped the machine’s forks and reversed back. He then felt a thud as the machine hit something, before driving over it a couple of inches. It felt like a “brick”, Speakman would later tell jurors at trial.
When he turned around, the horror of what had happened became clear as he saw Albie’s legs. Speakman picked his son up and ran inside. Albie was rushed to Royal Manchester Children’s Hospital, where he was pronounced dead that afternoon.
Speakman went on trial at Minshull Street Crown Court. He admitted breaching the Health and Safety at Work Act, having ‘[failed] to ensure the health and safety of Albie, so far as is reasonably practical’, but denied gross negligence manslaughter. He wept as he told jurors it was a ‘tragic accident’. “I messed up, I made a mistake,” he said. “It’s one bit of human error for a split second which has ruined my life.”
The telehandler, the court heard, was defective. A report concluded it did not meet the minimum requirements by the Construction and Use Regulations and that it was ‘foreseeable that persons in the vicinity of the vehicle could be injured or killed when the vehicle was working’.
The prosecution’s case was that Albie died “as a result of his father’s negligence, which created a serious and obvious risk of death”. Speakman was cleared of gross negligence manslaughter by jurors. He was told by a judge ‘all options are open’ when he faces sentence for the health and safety breach he admitted.
Leah spoke to the MEN days after the emotional court hearing. She said she and her family have been left heartbroken by the verdict.“I feel as though Albie has been let down,” she said. “I’m so disappointed. It’s hard to explain. I don’t even know where I go from here.”
The trial may be over, but Leah continues to relive that warm summer’s day over and over. “I always got there early so we could sit in the car and mess about or talk or whatever,” she said. “We would always say ‘bye’ in the car. I would drive to the end of the farm lane because it wasn’t really accessible for cars. His dad would come back and pick him up.
“I just said ‘bye’… I don’t really remember. I was going about doing business, I was at mum’s house and he [Speakman] rang me up. He was crying. It’s a bit of a blur, I can’t really fully remember it. He was saying something like ‘it’s Albie, it’s Albie’. I just knew there was something drastically wrong. He said ‘you need to come to the hospital’. The first thing I said was ‘is he alive?’. He said ‘no, he’s dead… he’s dead’.
“I thought it was a joke. Me and my mum thought it was a joke. I was driving to the hospital… all the way there, I was saying, ‘he’s joking, it’s a sick joke’. When I got there, the road was taped off… there was police. I knew it wasn’t a joke.”
Leah, a nursery practitioner at the nursery Albie attended, said the hours, days and weeks that followed were a blur. She eventually left her job as she was unable to bear the constant reminders of her son – including a star on the wall in his memory. Though she has since returned to work, she still can’t bring herself to enter that room.
“It just didn’t feel real,” she added. “Everything stopped for me, but everything carried on for everyone else. I didn’t go back to work. Where I worked, Albie went to nursery, I was in the same room as him. I couldn’t. There’s a bench in the garden called Albie’s Buddy Bench, it’s in his room – the toddler room. They bought a star for him and it’s on the wall. I try not to go in there.”
Described as a funny and happy little boy, Albie loved adventures, going to the beach, balls, doughnuts and anything round. Wanting to be closer to her son, who is buried at Radcliffe Cemetery, Leah has since moved from the home they once shared in Bolton to Radcliffe.
In the weeks following Albie’s death, Leah couldn’t move a single thing that belonged to him – not even the bowl of cornflakes that remained untouched from the day he died. “It was the breakfast he had that morning,” she added.
His belongings are now carefully vacuum-packed in the attic, preserved exactly as they were. To this day, Leah carries one of Albie’s jumpers from his wash basket with her wherever she goes.
“You just have to exist, don’t you?’,” she said. “You only exist and get on with your day. What else are you going to do? Die? You don’t have a choice but to get up and go to the shops to get your shopping. You just have to do things to keep existing. I work six days a week. I don’t do anything… I try and keep myself distracted. A few months back, I was working seven days a week. I had four different jobs – day shifts and night shifts. I just need to keep myself busy.
“Then I feel guilty because I’m not spending time with Ebon. He always comes to the cemetery with me. It’s something I think about – how do I tell him one day? Or does he already know because he goes to the cemetery with me? Albie would be six this year, but he’s three. Sometimes I think ‘It’s his birthday, would I buy him a Blippi toy?’. But he would be six, so he wouldn’t even like that. He’s stuck at three.
“Albie is Ebon’s big brother, but soon Ebon will be three, and then Ebon will be four, and Albie will still be three. It doesn’t make sense.” Leah does her best to stay strong for her son Ebon, now 19-months-old. “I struggle to leave him with anyone,” she admits. “When Ebon’s dad has him, I’, constantly texting him. I want pictures of him, I’m asking him what he’s doing every five minutes. I’m just so anxious. He’s the sole reason why I keep going.”
