Grieving Birmingham mum Lynne Baird wins bleed kits campaign to combat knife crime

It’s been a long battle for grieving mum Lynne Baird whose son Daniel was stabbed to death outside a Birmingham pub.

Since Daniel died aged 26, in July 2017 she has been campaigning for bleed kits to be rolled out across the country to help save others from knife crime.

Daniel had been out celebrating a new job with friends when he was attacked outside the Forge Tavern, in Digbeth, Birmingham.

Carlton Donaldson, then aged 24, was previously jailed for life, with a minimum of 23 years, after being convicted of murder.

Since his death, Mrs Baird, now aged 62,  has tirelessly campaigned to prevent knife-related deaths and raised thousands of pounds to purchase the kits through the Daniel Baird Foundation.

She discovered the anti-stab kits while researching measures to combat knife deaths online and originally launched a pioneering scheme in Birmingham.

Now 5,000 of the packs have been rolled out across other parts of the country, including Derbyshire where more than 30 have just been installed.

The packs - which include pressure dressings, gauze bandages and tourniquets - are designed to prevent stab-related deaths in the same way public defibrillators have been credited with a drop in heart attack fatalities.

Lynne, who has since been awarded an MBE for her services to charity, said: “Daniel was happy go lucky. He was never down for long.

“On that particular day everything seemed to be going really well, he’d got a new job, he was planning to get married, planning his mortgage and a new car.

"He was so happy but within hours, he was gone. I couldn’t understand how someone so young, fit and healthy just wasn’t coming home again.”

Lynne said she felt she needed to do something to try and prevent other families experiencing the same heartbreak while coming to terms with her devastating loss.

After speaking to her son Tom, who was a doctor at the same hospital in Birmingham where Daniel was taken after the stabbing, Lynne realised that advanced first aid kits in public premises such as pubs could make a huge difference in the minutes following a stabbing or serious accident.

She added: “I said from the start that we need them on every street, in every city and every town and village and not just for violent crime but for road accidents and things as well because even with the best response times you can’t always save someone from catastrophic bleeding, they need attention in those first few minutes.

“People say to me ‘you’re weird to like something like that’ but it could be so different and then they would have to go through the same as we had to. That’s what keeps me going really. I don’t want anyone to have to go through that – it’s an absolute nightmare.”

Daniel had just passed his final interview for a new job at Jaguar Land Rover the same morning he was killed and had planned to marry and get a house with partner Gemma.

Donaldson, of Erdington, Birmingham, knifed Daniel after an argument over an electronic punch bag machine in the pub.

Lynne now spends her time promoting the work of the foundation, as well as speaking to community groups and schools, explaining the devastation of knife crime.

She said: “I don’t think people even realise just how much damage these knives can do. There’s no safe place to stab anyone – you never know what could happen.

"A millimetre either way and that could be all that’s in it. Dan’s friend who was with him that night, he was stabbed within a fraction of his kidney.

"Just a little space lower and that would have been it, he’d have died too. Lives are just destroyed. It just devastates families.”