Grief on Teesside did not stop at the church door, and it did not stop at a bank transfer. In the hours after the crash the Cleveland Police Federation opened an appeal for the families of PC Matthew Blades and PC Tom Clough. By the time it closed on 1 September it had taken £1,203,932. A separate GoFundMe added tens of thousands more. The money is to be split equally and used as the families wish.

Federation secretary Carl Baker said there were not enough words to thank people. Donations, shares and messages arrived from across Britain and from Australia, France and the United States. Flowers were left at stations. That was the first public answer. The second was stranger and more personal. Blades had planned a year of runs for Parkinson’s UK after his mother-in-law’s diagnosis. The Great North Run was meant to be his second-to-last challenge.

He had never done the Newcastle-to-South Shields half marathon. Neither had his best friend of thirty years, Daragh Burke of Guisborough. They had been friends from primary school through university and godfathers to each other’s children. After the crash Burke took the vest and the place. He said he only wanted to make sure Matthew’s vest made it over the finish line, and that Matt would be laughing his head off because Burke’s starting pen sat just behind the elite runners after two weeks of training. “He was just someone that was always there and I never expected to not be there,” Burke said. Parkinson’s UK called the gesture an honour.

There was another unexpected stage. Blades’s two sons walked out at Old Trafford as Manchester United mascots, beside captain Bruno Fernandes, a quiet civic courtesy for a supporter who never came home from a night shift. Taken together, the cheque, the vest and the tunnel at Old Trafford say the same thing the Hartlepool pavement said: the public refused to let the story end at 03:39 on the A66. The federation could close a page. A best friend still had thirteen miles to run in a shirt that was never supposed to be his.

Source: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/pc-matthew-blades-funeral-a66-crash-police-middlesbrough-b3047302.html