Paul Breen: ‘My Maggie won’t get to see her grandfather Tom’

Published: 12 August, 2010
by RICHARD OSLEY

STANDING up on her daddy’s knee and puzzling about her first steps, little Maggie Breen is blissfully unaware of the tragedy that haunts her loving family.

Just nine months old and without a care in the world, her parents know one day they face the painful task of telling her why she will never see her grandfather, Tom.

A flick of a knife remains the cause of eight years of heartbreak.

Yesterday (Wednesday) marked the  anni­versary of Tom Breen’s death. He was stabbed in Camden High Street after a night out with a friend, and died after being rushed to the Royal Free Hospital.

Nobody has ever been charged with his murder but relatives insisted this week they have not given up hope. 

It remains an intense source of frustration for experienced detectives that a killer could escape from one of London’s busiest streets at night. 

CCTV cameras were facing in the wrong direction in those fateful moments on August 10, 2002. In his latest appeal for help, Tom’s son Stephen said: “If people feel they are too nervous to talk to the police, they can talk to me. There must be somebody who knows what happened. If they knew what this has done to my family, they might go to the police.”

Tom, a builder who had travelled to London for work from the family home in Downpatrick, Northern Ireland, missed seeing his son Paul get married two years ago and the birth of Paul’s daughter Maggie last year. Stephen said: “Maggie has obviously been lovely for us but it shows how different generations of our family have been affected by this. 

“My father never got to see his granddaughter – that was taken away from him – and Maggie will never get to see him.”

Around £50,000 in reward money, including private funds raised by the family, is still on offer to anybody who can help police finally crack the case. One man was arrested shortly after the murder but no charges were brought. 

Stephen said: “It has been eight years but my family will never give up hope. We keep on going. You have to stay positive. It could only take one person to go to the police with the information.” 

On August 10 each year, flowers are left at the scene but relatives find it too hard to go to the High Street.

“I know we will have to go there some day – but it is too painful, still, at the moment to go to Camden Town,” Stephen added. 

“If we could just get the chance to ask the person who has done this: why? Why did you feel the need to kill an innocent man?”