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A MOTHER has launched a campaign to stop drink-driving in Oldham in memory of her only son.



Football fan Carl Crowshaw was killed by a hit-and-run driver last summer —and now his mum, Sharon, has won the backing of dozens of the borough’s pubs in a bid to spare other families going through the same trauma.

Seventy posters bearing the message; “Don’t drink and drive. Could you live with yourself?” alongside a picture of Carl, have already been pinned up in pubs around Oldham.

And a giant banner was yesterday put up in Rochdale Road, Royton, where the 16-year-old died on August 1 last year — minutes after being hit by a speeding car driven by local man Aidan Graham.

Oldham Council has since asked for the banner — along with England flags and signs hung by Carl’s friends — to be removed, but Mrs Crowshaw hopes to come to an alternative arrangement.

She has vowed to use her son’s death as a reminder of the dangers of drink-driving after seeing Graham jailed for nearly four years at Manchester Crown Court yesterday.

“It is what is going to keep me going now and keep Carl’s memory alive,” she said. “My aim is to try to stop everybody from drink-driving ”

Mrs Crowshaw said she would also be fighting for a change in police policy when dealing with deaths. “My other aim is to get people who have killed somebody by drink-driving to go and see what they have actually done.

“I wanted this defendant to go and see Carl’s body in the mortuary to see what he had done to him. I believe that would be more punishment than anything else.”

At Christmas she hung a banner bearing a similar appeal at the same spot, at the corner of Vaughan Street, in a bid to stop drivers drinking alcohol over the festive period.

Carl, a former pupil at North Chadderton School, had been accepted into the Army just days before the tragedy.

A police officer who helped investigate the case endorsed the safety campaign.

PC Tony Edwards, from the road Policing unit at Mottram, said: “If her campaign can prevent one less person being killed through drink driving, and not having another family being put through this, then it is all worthwhile.”


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