This time 44 years ago I was busy, I was in the middle of A Levels. It is a time I remember vividly. It was a week into my A Levels that the local news carried the shocking story of Gail Kinchin. I was upset by this story and the awfulness of it has never really left me. Gail’s life was short, and it ended a long time ago, but she deserves all the more not to be forgotten. It is important that she is not forgotten.
Gail was 16 and three months pregnant by her violent and abusive boyfriend, an older man by the name of David Padgett. She has let him shortly before and was staying with a friend. Padgett went looking for her and forced Gail’s mother at gunpoint to take him to where Gail was staying. An hour later he was holed up with Gail in his council flat, just a mile or so from where I lived at the time. Gail’s mother had managed to run away and alert the police. Armed police officers waited in the stairwell outside the flat. After some time Padgett emerged from the flat brandishing a shotgun, holding Gail in front of him as a shield. When he opened fire and bullets began to ricochet off the concrete, the police returned fire. Gail was hit four times. Her baby died immediately, Gail the following month in hospital.
Padgett was convicted of manslaughter despite not having fired the bullets that killed Gail. The police reviewed the incident and made changes to training and procedures for firearms officers. All too late for Gail of course.
Innocent people continue to be shot by negligent or careless police officers. Women continue to die at the hands of violent men, often at the hands of their partners. It is depressing that, in many ways, so little has changed in the nearly half a century since the tragedy of that summer night in Rubery on the south west edge of Birmingham. Rest in Peace Gail.
