SOPHIE NORTHDescribed as “a popular, lively, inquisitive girl with huge brown sparkling eyes and a cheeky grin,” Sophie North was just five years old when she was killed in the massacre at Dunblane on 13 March, 1996.
She became one of gunman Thomas Hamilton’s 17 victims, shot dead in the school’s gymnasium along with 16 of her Dunblane Primary School classmates and school teacher Gwen Mayor.
Her mother had died of breast cancer shortly before her third birthday and she was very close to her father, Mick North, who recalls that they “became a team, a crutch for each other.”
Sophie Jane Lockwood North was from Bridgend and was a bright and popular girl.
“Sophie had her whole life ahead of her,” her father remembers.
March 13, 1996, had started like any other for five-year-old Sophie. She had eaten a bowl of Coco Pops and asked her father for a plaster to cover a scratch from Kit Kat, their pet. Her dad later recalled that she did not give him a kiss before leaving for the kids’ club that morning.
It was shortly after 9.30am that a former Scout leader, Thomas Hamilton, entered the gymnasium where Sophie and her classmates were beginning a gym lesson and opened fire with four handguns.
Mr North, an Oxford-educated academic, later recalled arriving at Dunblane after news of the incident broke. “I realised that this was something pretty serious,” he said. “But I still didn’t think the worst. It’s a huge school, more than 700 pupils. I asked myself what are the chances of Sophie being involved? I thought that they were minimal.”
It later transpired, after more than five hours of waiting for news, that Sophie had been shot many times.
Today, Mr North still campaigns for stringent gun laws and urges society to deal with individuals like Hamilton before it is too late.
In 2006, he opened a charitable trust in Sophie’s name, which will donate funds for breast cancer research, children’s hospices and anger management and conflict resolution.
“The life I live now is different from what it would have been had I been the father of a 15-year-old girl,” he said. “I hope that the people of Dunblane will remember.”
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