After losing his son, Oliver Freckleton, to a horrific knife crime killing, devoted dad Rob Freckleton threw himself into preventing future deaths, with his emotional journey taking him to the boxing ring
On December 11, 2021, new dad Oliver Freckleton headed out to a house party. A popular individual known for his “booming laugh”, Oliver hadn’t been out socialising in months, but his girlfriend encouraged him to go.
It was the day before his 20th birthday. He had plans to spend the next day at West Midlands Safari Park with his girlfriend and their six-month-old daughter. Tragically, Oliver never made it home that night and was brutally murdered while bravely trying to protect his pals from aggressors
The fight was not his. He was upstairs when he heard a ‘commotion’ at the front door of the house in a “nice area” of Burton-upon-Trent at 1.30 am. He walked downstairs to find a group trying to get into the house to attack his best friend’s little brother. This comes as Prime Minister Keir Starmer vows to end the epidemic of violent knife crime.
Courageous Oliver told the other boy to run while he blocked the doorway, his father, Robert ‘Rob’ Freckleton, from Horninglow, Burton-Upon-Trent, tells The Mirror of his 19-year-old son who refused to let the group in, despite the fact they were armed with a gun.
Instead, Oliver was attacked with a knife and suffered catastrophic injuries. Rob, 53, says: “They stabbed him in his thigh. He had other wounds as well; they stabbed him in the thigh, and it severed his femoral artery and femoral vein. We know now that he would have probably gone into cardiac arrest in about four minutes.”
After getting the call that would change their lives forever, Oliver’s mum and his younger brother Charlie, 17 – who was also supposed to have been at the party – dashed to the scene and found Oliver lying on the floor surrounded by armed police as paramedics worked on him with a defibrillator. Willing him to pull through, they lay alongside his broken body, but sadly, it was too late.
It was then that Rob received a call to tell him his son was dead. “You know, I just screamed and I just fell to the floor, you know, I was numb.”
But Oliver’s final words – confirmed by officers at the scene – brought him comfort . They were not about himself, but about his baby girl. Holding back tears, “family man” Rob, from Horninglow, shared: “While he was lying there, and his best friend was holding him, his dying words were, ‘Look after my daughter’. And as I said at his eulogy at his funeral, I’m so proud of the man he became. Now, he knew he was dying, but his first thought was his daughter.”
Charlie, now 20, had also been invited to the party that night, but had declined the invite as he was on day four of isolation with Covid. As Rob reflected, he could well have lost two children that night.
After returning home, the grief-stricken family set about calling loved ones to break the terrible news. An impossible undertaking, but they were aware of how quickly things can spread in an age of social media.
Remembering the hours that followed, Rob shared how he couldn’t bear the thought of Oliver’s body lying alone, for 15 long hours, at the cordoned-off crime scene.
The construction worker said: “I remember, all day, I just kept driving back to the scene. Because I didn’t want my son to be on his own. I know it seems a bit silly.”
Then, three days after what should have been Oliver’s birthday celebrations, Rob faced the devastating task of identifying his son’s body in the morgue. “That’s an image that will stay with me or haunt me for the rest of my life.”
His wife couldn’t go as she had COVID at the time. They had considered just going together anyway, knowing that it was their “time to say goodbye”, but knew they couldn’t run the risk of passing the infection onto police officers in case it impeded the investigation.
As Rob has noted: “We might not have got the sort of, I’m not going to say the word justice, but we might not have got the convictions that we did.”
And so Rob viewed Oliver’s body alone. He told us: “I remember just, you know, stroking his head and just kissing him on the forehead and telling him how much I loved him. It breaks you as a human.”
Because of the time of year, Oliver’s family had to wait until January for his body to be released, and it was then that, nearly three weeks after the young father’s death, his mother finally got to view him at the chapel of rest.
Harrowingly, he was not the boy Rob had so tenderly said goodbye to three weeks earlier. “He’d really changed. I went, but I felt I’d already seen him a few days after his birthday, and it was still my boy. But at the chapel of rest, he’d completely changed because it had been three weeks. And for my wife, that’s the next time she got to see him.”
Oliver’s funeral followed, where Rob carried his son’s coffin into the church, something he felt he “needed to do”. In his eulogy, which was “unbelievably tough” to read, Rob told stories about his son and spoke of how proud they’d been of him. A poignant moment followed when his granddaughter spotted a photograph of Oliver. “While I was talking, there was a picture behind me, and his daughter said her first words. She said, ‘Dada’.”
Remembering his boy who was “the life and soul of the party” and lit up “every room he went into with his infectious giggle,” Rob continued: “He just had so many friends. He was just so, so popular. You know, even growing up, he just wanted to be out all the time in nature, loved his animals.”
Sharing how his son met “the love of his life” at the age of 18, he told how the smitten pair soon moved in together and started their own family. Smiling, Rob recalled seeing “the joy in his eyes” as “nervous” Oliver told him he was going to be a granddad. Although he was young, Rob said: “He was happy, and, as a parent, that’s all you ever want children to be, is happy.”
Oliver was buried with his grandfather, who he’d been close to, and the family was left to face life without him. Rob shared: “But the devastation, people don’t see what it’s done for Oliver’s brother; he’s broken. My wife, grandparents, Oliver’s friends, and ultimately his girlfriend, his daughter, she was six months old, and it just completely broke us.”
After the funeral, the family had to wait a year for the trial at Stafford Crown Court, which saw one man convicted of Oliver’s murder, while another three individuals were convicted of manslaughter.
During that long wait for the trial, Robert felt as though he “needed to do something for Oliver”, and so he reached out to Lynn Baird, whose son Daniel Baird was also killed in a knife crime incident in Birmingham back in 2017. In Daniel’s memory, Lynn set up The Daniel
Baird Foundation, which works alongside local government organisations, community groups, and business organisations to ensure life-saving bleeding control packs are made available at premises across the country.
Inspired by Lynn’s work, Rob has since helped raise funds for this important cause and installed the first seven bleeding control packs in his area, in memory of Oliver. Rob also dedicates himself to educating young people about the horrors of knife crime, working with local knife crime charities, and telling Oliver’s story in schools, in the hope of striking a chord with youngsters.
Rob told us: “If it got to one person and they made the choice not to carry a knife, you know, it’s a life saved.”
Rob has taken things a step further by walking into the boxing ring for the first time, in a bid to raise funds for Charlie’s Promise, a knife crime charity founded by fellow bereaved dad, Martin Cosser, who lost his own son in July 2023.
For Rob, who’d kept updated with the Cosser family’s ordeal on social media, Martin’s story “really resonated” with him.
He explained: “The way we lost our children was so similar. He lost his son Charlie, it was at a party. And this guy was threatening people, girls, and stuff like that, and he went over to try and stop it. And ultimately, he lost his life. He got stabbed three times. Once in the heart as well.
“Before he turned his son’s life machine off, [Martin] made a promise that he would do everything to his dying day to try and combat knife crime. And that’s how Charlie’s Promise started.”
Martin and Rob had been in contact “for ages”, and Rob was keen to do something to support Charlie’s Promise. He’d participated in charity football matches before, but this time, he wanted to do something ” a little bit different” that would really “grab people’s attention”.
Determined Rob, who’d never boxed before in his life, signed up for an Ultra White Collar Boxing (UWCB) event, which involved eight weeks’ worth of gruelling training in the run-up at Burton Boxing Gym. From start to finish, Rob lost nearly two stone, with the professional training doing wonders for his health and fitness.
Rob reached out to family, friends, and local businesses for sponsorship, and things “snowballed” from there. By the time he entered the ring on April 26, Rob, the oldest competitor there, had raised almost £5,000 for Charlie’s Promise.
Rob felt like a “superstar” as he entered the ring, cheered on by 65 family members and friends. Founder Martin, who lives down South, also made the journey to watch the bout, with their first face-to-face meeting proving to be an “emotional” one.
The night, held at Uttoxeter Racecourse, before hundreds of supporters, proved to be an “amazing” experience, with Rob emerging as the top fundraiser.
Although he didn’t win the boxing match, Rob hasn’t been put off one bit and intends to return for another fight in November. The day after his fight, he placed his trophy by Oliver’s grave.
And what would Oliver have thought about his dad becoming a boxer? On this note, Rob chuckled: “I don’t know about proud. He would have laughed at me.
“He’d have loved to have seen me in the ring, of course. He loved boxing. He would have been proud of me. He probably wouldn’t have said it to me. But I know because my other son Charlie, and this is the thing that made it for me. As I walked out of the ring, you know, I’d lost the fight. It got stopped in the third round.
“And as I was walking out, Charlie came up to me, and he’d given me a bit of stick beforehand, you know, as you’d expect, with children, he’d given me a bit of a stick. But he just said to me, ‘Dad, that was awesome’. He said he was so proud of me. And for me, walking out of the ring now, I was a winner. Just hearing that from my son, I was a winner.”
You can find out more about Charlie’s Promise here
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