Tim Osborn’s mum has spoken of the terrible moment she found her son’s body lying in a ditch after a hit and run.
Lynne Osborn had gone out searching for 27-year-old Tim at about midnight on Friday after he failed to return home from work.
She and her son Michael set out from their home in Bourne Road, Pode Hole, to walk the route Tim usually took.
She said: “We had been getting increasingly worried because Tim was usually like clockwork.
“We had spent the evening trying not to worry but by midnight we knew something was wrong.
“We expected to just bump into him pushing his bike with a punctured tyre, or at worst limping because he’d come off his bike.
“We had been walking about five or ten minutes when I saw a shape lying in the ditch beside the road and I just knew straight away it was him.
“I said ‘oh God, Michael, it’s Tim’. I don’t know how I knew, but I just knew it was him.”
“We started shouting his name but got no response.
“We clambered down the bank and Michael rang 999, I still couldn’t see his bike so I thought he had been attacked.
“I checked for a pulse but couldn’t find one – I just panicked.”
The 999 operator told Michael and Lynne to turn Tim on his back, but he was wedged between a hedge and the bank so the panicked pair went door to door near the crash scene trying to get help.
The only person to open their door was an 82-year-old woman, who let Lynne use her phone to call home.
At home, Tim’s dad Stephen and his sisters Zoe (22) and Emma (20) received that terrible phone call.
Emma said: “Zoe woke me up to say Mum had found Tim in a ditch and he wasn’t breathing.
“We all just went running down the road.”
Emergency services were soon on the scene.
Lynne said: “The paramedic just looked at him and said there was nothing they could do. My son was already dead.”
Later the family were told that Tim would probably have been knocked unconscious by the impact and would have died soon afterwards.
Even if they had found him sooner, there would have been nothing they could do.
Tim’s bike was found quite a distance back down the road, mangled, where it had obviously been hit, and debris from what is believed to be a silver van covered the road.
Almost immediately the area was cordoned off as police realised it was a crime scene and the hunt began for the driver that left Tim for dead.