Second officer killed in A66 crash laid to rest as community mourns

In the space of two days, a community gathered twice to bury officers lost in the same instant — a wrong-way collision on the A66 near Middlesbrough that claimed seven lives on a single August night. PC Tom Clough, 38, a former soldier turned armed officer, died alongside his colleague PC Matthew Blades while searching for a vehicle whose cloned plates had drawn their attention; the five young men inside that vehicle perished too. His funeral on Thursday completed a pair of services that together held the weight of a profession's grief and a public's reckoning with how swiftly ordinary duty ca