As Cumbrian gunman Derrick Bird headed into Whitehaven intent on killing rival taxi drivers, armed officers went past him in the opposite direction, a Channel 4 documentary claims tonight.
Police received reports at 10.20am on Wednesday, June 2, of shots being fired in the village of Frizington, five miles east of Whitehaven. Officers from Whitehaven and other stations were immediately sent to the scene.
However, the shooting had been carried out by Derrick Bird, who then travelled into Whitehaven as armed officers were travelling out of Whitehaven, which the Cumbria Police acknowledge, according to the C4 documentary.
At 10.33am, Derrick Bird shot dead taxi driver Darren Rewcastle at the cab rank in Duke Street, Whitehaven. Within minutes he shot and wounded three more taxi drivers and one passenger. He did not encounter any armed police in Whitehaven, or anywhere else on what the Chief Constable has called a “45 mile rampage across West Cumbria”, in which Bird killed 12 people and injured 11 more before committing suicide.
Channel 4’s “Chasing the Cumbrian Killer” reports that policing in Frizington was already higher than usual on June 2 because by terrible coincidence, this was the same morning of the funeral for a local 16 year old girl killed in a Lake District bus crash.
Alan Webber, the village postmaster, says: “We had actually people on the streets here, lining up to pay their respects for the funeral as it was coming through the village and at the same time the police were going through the village and we were told in no uncertain terms to clear the streets to make sure people were indoors.”
According to the documentary, produced by Mentorn Media, despatching armed officers to Frizington, plus other units, meant that from the start, police were at a significant disadvantage in trying to catch Derrick Bird.
Also in the documentary a relative of Derrick Birds, Brian Spencer, speaks for the first time about the impact it has had on the family and remembers how they were together just a week earlier:
“A week previous David and his brother Derrick were up at the local scramble track with an off road vehicle David had just finished making and they spent quite a bit of time that afternoon driving round and round and laughing their heads off like you’d expect warm brothers to do. There wasn’t any underlying reason or anything brewing. The feeling of shock and horror, there hasn’t been words written yet to describe that feeling of emotion.”
The documentary also features a number of interviews with survivors including Emma Percival who remembers being in a taxi with Bird three weeks before: “There was summat wrong with him. There was summat was there that's made him go like that because a few weeks ago I was in his taxi and he didn't seem like that, and he was fine. But as the weeks have gone on, there's summat there, so he's probably had a mental break down or summat.”
For further information or interviews with Producer/Director, Mark Gregory please contact Louise Plank on 020 8995 3936 or lou@plankpr.com