The fight that never ends

Ten years after a coward punch killed his son, Paul Stanley is still recounting the story — at great personal cost.

The best parenting advice I ever got was from a father who'd just lost his son. I was soon to enter a hospital room to watch my daughter being born and Paul Stanley had recently exited a hospital room having switched a life support system off on his son, Matthew, a 15-year-old blond-haired kid fatally bashed outside a teenager's party on September 23, 2006. "Enjoy every last second of it because it's the best thing you'll ever do," Paul said. It was said through tears, a good line even without its bitter context. There was a wobbly, bare-bone rawness to Paul then, like he might have disintegrated with a wind change and been grateful for the quick exit.

We sat for hours that day at the far end of his backyard in Thornlands, east Brisbane, out of earshot of his wife, Kay, who was inside the house, barely ready to face daylight much less the death of her first son. Paul was chewing over what to do with Matthew's bedroom, wondering if he should clear out his son's clothes and books and if doing so meant clearing out pieces of Matthew. He'd hear the front gate close and instinctively think it was Matthew coming home. Then he'd release this soft, shuddering moan — hrrrrrnnnnnnnnnnn; this quiet wail, not so much choking back tears as choking back vomit because his grief had turned physical, it was in his stomach and his blood and brain and his trembling hands told him he wasn't going to last much longer shouldering all that pain if he didn't find some other place to put it.

"Look how far you've come," I say, as Paul Stanley's state government-funded Cessna climbs out of Brisbane's Archerfield Airport en route to Warwick. Paul smiles, looks out the plane window, down to a landscape of hills that could use some rain. "Somewhere along the way you have to make a decision, whether it's the right one or the wrong one," he says.

He put his pain into a story. He'd drive around in a white work van between jobs for his floor coating business, making unpaid visits to schools across Brisbane to give a 45-minute talk about how a single punch can kill a kid and kill a dad at the same time; reduce the best thing he ever did to a small rectangular plot in an east Brisbane memorial garden lined with flowers.

For 10 years, Paul phoned and doorknocked and lobbied and begged councils and governments to wake up to the issue of youth violence. He must have told his story at least 100 times in public every year for 10 years, across schools and prisons and detention centres and police stations and town halls. Brisbane, then Queensland, then wider Australia and parts of New Zealand. "I could have dug a hole and jumped into it and put the dirt over my head and Matthew would have just been that kid who got bashed to death at a party and nobody would have got any good out of it," he says.

In April, Paul Stanley's ship came in. Queensland education minister Kate Jones announced a One Punch Can Kill initiative that will allow Paul to give his 45-minute talk to Year 12 students in every state high school across Queensland this year. What this means is that he's not funding his travels out of his own pocket; that he can buy himself a new pair of slacks for when he meets with prime ministers and premiers.

There's a folder on his lap, a wad of papers detailing his schedule this week, an exhaustive town-hop across rural Queensland schools: Warwick, Stanthorpe, Goondiwindi, St George, Cunnamulla, Charleville, Roma, Kingaroy, Nanango and Toogoolawah. His right forefinger unconsciously flaps a corner of the A4 paper schedule. Flap, flap, flap, flap. Thinking about Matty. Always Matty. The plane makes its slow descent into Warwick. "I think I made the right decision," he says. He shakes his head. Flap, flap, flap, flap. "But that decision always had a cost."

I know his personal story well and I'm not sure the students of Warwick State High School are ready for it. "What do you leave out for the school talks?" I ask as we scurry across a lawn in the heart of the 100-year-old brown brick school, a blasting icy winter wind pushing through our bones and on into town. He thinks on this for a moment. "Nothing," he says.

Teacher Michelle Ferdinand dims the lights in the lecture theatre filled with 100 Year 12 students watching a video package of nightly news grabs edited together to tell a soundbite story of how Matthew Stanley lost his life. The video ends, the screen goes black. From a side door Paul enters the lecture theatre and stops in the centre of the room, an arm's length from his wet-eyed audience.

"Hi everybody," he says. "I'm Matt's dad."

He recalls every detail. The Stanleys ate snails that night. It was the 12th birthday of Matt's younger brother, Nick, and the family had celebrated at a local French restaurant before dropping Matt at an 18th birthday party in suburban Alexandra Hills, east Brisbane. Matt never once complained that Nick's celebration was holding him up from the party.

Driving home that night Paul would turn to Kay and say, out of the blue, how proud he was of the young man Matt had become; how, by some divine fortune, they had become the owners of one those rare teenage boys blessed with an acute awareness of the importance of friendship and family and the value of commitment to work and sport and living in the moment; a young dreamer who was dry and funny and only rarely an A-grade teenage smart-arse. When Matt hopped out of the family car that night he farewelled his mum and brother, then reached into the driver's side window and playfully tugged the back of his dad's hair. "See ya later, Dad," he said. And that, of course, is how teenage boys say, "I love you."

"But he never did," Paul says, holding a school microphone at his chest. "He never saw us again."

Around 10pm, a friend of Matt's reached Paul on the phone: "Matty's been attacked. He's badly injured. Get here now." The street was called Brompton Street. Paul saw police cars, motorcycles and paddy wagons. He saw blue lights flashing, cops herding drunk teens away from footpaths.

And he saw his son, lying by the side of the road, lit up in the darkness by a pair of car headlights.

Paul and Kay knelt beside him, saw the pool of blood that had formed around his head, blood running from his nose, ears and mouth. The closed eyes. The sound. Matt's crushed lungs struggling for air.

Much-loved: Matthew Stanley

A 16-year-old partygoer, the police were told, had taken a dozen cans of bourbon and Coke to the party and drunk them all, then started on the free beer. "As the night went on he got more and more aggressive," Paul says. "Matt and his mates realised this party was not going to end up in a good place. This guy saw them walking out the gate and took offence at the fact they were leaving the party. He ran out the gate and started screaming at them, yelling abuse."

He ran up close to Matt and Matt raised his arms passively, arms up, palms out. "We're just going home," Matt said. The last words he ever spoke. We're just going home.

"This guy launched himself at Matthew," Paul says. "He punched Matthew. The boys said the way Matthew crumpled, he was probably unconscious before he hit the ground. His head hit the concrete and this guy then started to kick Matty in the body and the head. He then knee-dropped his 105 kilos onto Matty's chest. He backhanded Matthew a couple of times, then he got up and kicked Matthew one more time in the head. He then poured beer over Matthew and called him a coward for not getting up and fighting. He then went away to another party, where he was arrested."

Matthew's killer later pleaded guilty to manslaughter and spent two and a half years in juvenile detention before he found his way back, temporarily, to the suburbs of east Brisbane where he once waved at Paul from a relative's front balcony as Paul drove to work.

Four Year 12 girls in the second row at Warwick High are weeping openly, passing a white woollen glove between themselves that they use to wipe their tears. The sorrow is contagious, one tear brings another across the room, brings another by that person's side. "Kay and I just stayed with Matthew, pleading with him to open his eyes," Paul says. "Then an ambulance officer lifted Matthew's eyelids and shone a light in his eyes and I just remember what he said."

He breathes, drops his head for five seconds. The story has drained him and he's only halfway through. That chilling moan has never left him. Hrrrrrrnnnnnnnnnnnn. This is the last thing he wants to talk about and it is the only thing he wants to talk about.

"He said, 'Oh my God'."

Paul first told me the story 10 years ago in the garden bar of Brisbane's Jubilee Hotel. He drank orange juice because he was afraid of what he might do with alcohol in his system. "It was the frustration of feeling that everything was falling apart around me," he says. "How dare my beautiful son get taken from me?"

In the wake of Matthew's death, Queensland's police minister formed a Youth Violence Taskforce. "People were saying we had to do something but nobody knew what that something was," Paul says. "All the pollies in Peter Beattie's government and all the coppers got together and I went along as the obligatory grieving father and I was meant to sit in the corner overawed by all the politicians. It didn't quite work out that way."

Paul Stanley announced the formation of the Matthew Stanley Foundation to end youth violence.

"We'll talk to schools, talk to different groups," he said back then. "I also see us lobbying governments to implement change. We're completely non-political. I don't care who's in power.

I'll rattle anyone's chain, because I don't want to see anyone else's kid lying in a pool of blood."

And, singlehandedly, he kept youth violence on the Queensland political agenda for a decade.

It's impossible to tell how many lives his school talks have saved. Former Queensland police commissioner Bob Atkinson had a quiet word with Paul at one of the award ceremonies recognising his efforts. "Every time one of my boys or girls in blue doesn't attend an act of violence, we might be able to thank you," he said. "But we'll never know, will we, because it didn't happen."

Last month, a Year 12 boy approached Paul in a lecture theatre. The boy had recently lost his best friend, killed by a drunk driver while he was skateboarding home. "When did you learn that you could talk about Matthew's death?" the boy asked. Paul told him he was immediately thrust into talking about his son's death by the media, who were looking for answers on how we tackle youth violence. The boy said he hadn't been able to talk to anyone about his friend's death. "Well, what are you doing right now?" Paul said.

He's been so present in schools for so long that Queensland teens now use the Matt Stanley story to stop fights before they start: "Remember what happened to Matt Stanley."

"There's only pre- and post-Paul Stanley in Queensland," says minister for state development Anthony Lynham, who, before politics, was a maxillofacial surgeon at Royal Brisbane Hospital.

He joined Paul's campaign after spending too many Friday and Saturday nights repairing the damaged faces of drunken teenagers. If you want to gauge Paul's impact, he says, look no further than the overhauled anti-violence liquor laws, reducing service hours and access to rapid intoxication drinks, rolled out in Queensland this month. "You can take it right back to Paul," he says. "People like me saw the issue in hospitals but he had that story. Only someone who has suffered that tragedy could relate to kids. Kids go home and tell their families and that message then gets across to the whole of society."

At the end of the school talk in Warwick, teacher Michelle Ferdinand approaches Paul in tears. It's the third time she's heard it in 10 years. She's thinking about her own children, aged 25 and 22. "You'll never be able to measure it," she says. "You'll never have the data of the difference you've made." She measures an inch with her forefinger and thumb. "You just have to hope that you've made this much difference in every one of those kids' lives. Twenty years from now some kid will come up to you and say, 'I remember when you did that talk and it made a difference to me'. And that's gonna have to be enough."

In a heated hall in Stanthorpe State High School, half an hour's flight from Warwick, Paul tells Year 12 students about the vision of his son lying on a hospital bed in Princess Alexandra Hospital. A neurosurgeon showed Paul and Kay scans of his fractured skull. Matthew had four broken ribs, a crushed lung. "Wires connected to his head, wires to his chest, all connected to a life support system," he says. "Matthew's brain was bleeding so badly that you could see his brain was starting to ooze out of his ear." The neurosurgeon was direct: "Matthew has severe brain injuries. It is irreversible and he is going to die."

Doctors had asked Paul and Kay on four separate occasions, between morning and night, if they were ready to switch off their son's life support system. No. No. No. No. "We've gone through this," a doctor said, finally. "Matthew is not going to open his eyes ever again. This is the best it will be. You're going through pain but what we want you to do is to consider switching Matthew's life support system off."

Paul shivers, takes a breath. "By that time we should have realised there was no chance," he says. "Kay and I looked at each other and I leaned over and I switched Matthew's life support system off, effectively killing my son. Matthew's body just tensed for a moment and relaxed and all the numbers on the life support system scrolled down to zero. And my son died."

Unflinching: at a school talk. Picture: Christie Anderson

He doesn't remember driving home from the hospital. He remembers pressing a button in the elevator outside Matthew's hospital room and then his brain blacked out. "I woke up in my bed and I was trying get my head around this awful feeling I had," he says. "Was this a dream or wasn't it? I needed to know if it was true so I went and knocked on Matthew's bedroom door. There was no answer. I knocked again and there was still no answer. So I went in and his bed was exactly the same as it was when he got out of bed on that Saturday morning. It wasn't a dream."

He asks the students to close their eyes. "I want you to think about a special person in your life," he says. He leaves long gaps between sentences. "Picture their face," he says.

Total silence in the theatre.

"Can you hear the sound of their voice?" Another long pause. "Go back to the last time you were speaking to them and see if you can remember what they were talking about. Can you remember the last thing you said to them?" A girl in the front row starts crying. A boy in the fifth row starts crying. "Can you remember the last thing they said to you?" The whole room is crying now. "Now open your eyes."

He doesn't have to say much more. He doesn't have to link things back to the past or the future or to the deep loves in the students' own lives; they're already doing that themselves. They have stopped for a single closed-eye minute in their pressure-cooker lives and seen, however briefly, the things that matter to them most. "Just be careful," Paul says. And the story is over.

In the second row, Edlyn Clift, 17, is weeping into her school jumper sleeves. "The last thing I said to my mum today was the same thing I say to her every day," she says, drying her tears. "I said, 'Normal pickup?'" She shakes her head, chuckling at how absurd that sounds. "I don't have the greatest relationship with my mum but she's really the only person I have in my family. Normal pickup! That's so depressing. What if that was the last thing I said to her? I think I'm gonna go home and cry and tell my mum I love her so much."

Another student rushes to Paul in hysterics; she's concerned for her brother who has been showing signs of recklessness. "I'm so worried about him," she says. Paul replies: "Tell him about the story you heard today. And maybe, just maybe, he might think a bit before he does something he can't go back and change."

And that's how it works. Paul tells his story and someone tells their story about what it felt like to hear it. If that reckless brother listens to his sister, the message sticks and he leads a long and fruitful life and Paul never hears about things that never happened, his time in Stanthorpe will have been worth it.

"Before Matt was killed I wasn't the person I am now," Paul says in the school's administration office, waiting for his cab to the airport, where his government plane waits to fly him further west to Goondiwindi. "I was reasonably shy. The thing that changed was I realised the world needed to be altered slightly from the way it was. I lost the fear." He slips into his cab and a knockabout driver makes a cheery conversation starter. "What brings you blokes here today?" he says. And for the third time today Paul Stanley tells the story of how he lost his son.

I ask, "Do you remember what you said to me about being a dad?" The last oranges and pinks of twilight are falling over the horseracing track opposite the Goondiwindi Motel. At a small round table outside his room, Paul sips slowly on a mini-bar beer. "I remember," he says. "I just knew you'd enjoy it as much as I did. I couldn't believe what I was watching when Matt was born."

He beams, then a tear forms in his eye and he head-shakes it away. There are, in fact, some things he leaves out of his talks to school students. He leaves things out about Laura, Matthew's older sister who died at birth. He leaves things out about the toll Matthew's death has taken on his family relationships. He leaves out the moment Matthew's kid brother Nick asked him to quit his work with the foundation, to stop travelling the country telling the story about the beloved older brother who died on Nick's birthday. "The fact it happened on Nick's birthday," Paul says, shuddering. "That, alone ... " He doesn't finish that thought. "Every year for a number of years, until his 16th birthday, we actually celebrated Nick's birthday on the ninth of September, we just changed the day for him.

"Nick has only ever come to Matt's grave once with me to put flowers on. The next time I was calling in after doing a job and he sat in the car."

Paul regularly takes calls from random strangers seeking advice on how to manage the loss of a child. On a weekly basis he finds himself neck-deep in the most intense conversations about death. His friends, Bruce and Denise Morcombe — whose son Daniel was murdered in 2003 have grown accustomed to the same phenomenon. "One thing I always ask people when they call me up is, 'Do you have any other children?' They say, 'Yes I do'. And I say, 'How many times a day have you been telling them how much you love them?'

"Every person that came around after Matt died wanted to talk about Matt. It just carried on that way. And Nick was, basically, ignored. Everybody just knew Nick was there. Nobody felt they had to get into a deep and meaningful conversation with Nick. That just kept chewing away at him and I'm as much at fault as anybody."

He sighs. "Nah, that's what I'd have again," he says. "If I'd had it all over again I'd certainly do things differently with Nick. That's the sorry, sad part about it all."

They talk mostly in text messages now: "Happy birthday, Nick. Who'd have thunk it, 21 today! Congratulations mate, I hope you have a lovely, lovely day and if you feel like giving me a call, please do."

Nick didn't call back.

"The ripples on the pond," Paul says.

That's what violence left him with. Ten years of ripples. "The ripples just don't stop. They just keep kicking you all along the line."

He doesn't tell the school kids about how Matthew's death caused the slow disintegration of his marriage. "It's totally over," he says.

"I'm so sorry to hear that," I say.

"So am I," he says. "It was nearly 30 years. That's a long time. But Kay switched off a long time ago and so did I. But I am majorly to blame for us separating. I couldn't see my nose in front of my face. I was too busy doing my thing to turn around and spend the time with her that she deserved. And, you know ... " He breathes deep. His thoughts are making him ache. "It was the same with Nick. But with Nick it was both of us. We were pulling in two different directions. These arguments started."

"Could any relationship survive what you guys went through?" I ask him.

He's posed that very question to his friend, Ross Thompson, whose Queensland Homicide Victims' Support Group is helping Paul reach the state's 222 schools through the One Punch Can Kill initiative. "We see it all the time and I've had to work hard at it myself," says Ross, whose son Michael was killed in an infamous triple murder in Toowoomba in 2005. "We see a lot of marriages break up because of the stress associated with these events. One partner might seem to be handling it well and the other is not, or one blames the other, or one thinks the other should be able to get over it but they can't move on."

Ross knows why Nick Stanley asked his dad to abandon his work with the Matthew Stanley Foundation and he knows why Paul could not do that. "I'm battling with that very same issue as we speak," Ross says. "I've had a rough journey over the last 12 months where I know what I'm doing is good but I know it's bringing me down. But if I stop, what does that do to Michael and his memory? What am I throwing away?

"This violence has got to stop. How else are we going stop it if we're not out there talking about it? I do what I do to save lives and otherwise I'd be a mess. You have to look at the other side of this horrific journey and try and make something out of a bad situation and if you can't, that's when you end up with mental institutions.

"Sometimes people need to find other reasons to live, sometimes other than their children."

Driven: Stanley’s work has taken a huge toll. Picture: Kenny Smith

Paul shakes his head, angry now, as those Goondiwindi oranges and pinks turn fully to black. "He killed us," he says. "It wasn't just Matthew's murder. It was Kay's and my murder, too. You take a step back and look at all the crap there is, it all started on the 23rd of September, 2006." He weeps now and the cold air makes him shudder. "And I can't change a single part of it."

At 9.30am the following morning, Paul's cab arrives to drive him to Goondiwindi State High School. "What are you doing at the school?" asks a warm-faced and elderly cabbie. "I'm giving an anti-violence talk to students," he says. "My son, Matthew, was bashed to death at a party in 2006."

"Good on you," the old cabbie says.

At 10am, the school's Year 12 group files into the library and sits cross-legged on the carpet to watch the edited video detailing the events of September 23, 2006.

At 10.15am, Paul walks in to the library hall from the side, stands in front of 100 young men and women.

"Hi everybody," he says. "I'm Matt's dad."