Raoul Moat's dad says sorry for shootings
Sep 7 2010 by Rob Pattinson, The Journal
THE father Raoul Moat never knew yesterday issued an unreserved apology to all of the gunman's victims.
Peter Blake, 68, said he was sorry for everything he “didn’t do” while Moat was growing up, which he believed had resulted in the doorman becoming a violent killer.
The retired civil servant, from Croydon, London, had previously publicly accepted blame for Moat’s killing rampage, saying he should have been there to give the bodybuilder the love he had obviously been missing as a child.
Just moments before Moat, 37, took his own life with a sawn-off shotgun in a stand-off with police he was heard to say: “I’ve no dad, no one cares about me.”
Yesterday Mr Blake, told presenters on daytime ITV show, This Morning: “It just makes me feel even worse than I did before because he did have a dad, and his dad did care for him, but he never had access to him and that was the fundamental problem, I think, in his life.”
Asked what he would say to the family of slain Chris Brown and Moat’s seriously injured ex-lover Sam Stobbart, Mr Blake said: “What I would like to say to all victims, and I say this about Raoul himself, because I see him as a victim in this incredible tragedy, is I’m sorry.
“I’m sorry not for what I did, but for what I didn’t do.
“I’m dreadfully sorry to all his victims.” Moat’s father was spotted as a lonely figure at his son’s funeral, in Newcastle’s West End, last month, where he helped carry the coffin into the chapel.
His identity was only known to the body-builder’s brother Angus Moat, 40.
Moat, of Fenham Hall Drive, Newcastle, shot himself on July 10, a week after shooting Miss Stobbart, 22, and executing her new lover Mr Brown, 29, in Birtley, Gateshead.
Less than 24 hours after the double shooting the fugitive declared war on Northumbria Police and gunned down PC David Rathband, blinding the 42-year-old officer as he sat in his stationary patrol car, at the junction of the A1 and the A69 in Newcastle.
Mr Blake yesterday also revealed he had been busy packing to come to the North East in a bid to help bring his son in, when the riverside stand-off, in Rothbury, Northumberland, came on the TV.
The killer’s father said: “I thought it’s going to take at least six hours to get there and I thought it would only last a couple of hours. I just sat and watched. I was hoping he would fall asleep, he must have been tired. I was hoping if he nods off they’ll be able to grab him, but it didn’t turn out like that.”
The father says he watched in stunned horror as the son had never even met killed himself live on national television.
“I heard what seemed very much like a shotgun and I thought he’s dead,” Mr Blake said.
“He’s holding that gun next to his head and it’s one shot, if he was going to fire he’d probably have fired both shots. I didn’t know what to do, I was in a daze.”
Mr Blake says he fathered Moat while working as a civil servant, in the North East, during the 1970s. The gunman’s father says he moved into a cottage in picturesque Longhorsley, Northumberland, with the killer’s mother Josephine Moat, and her then baby Angus, but their relationship later broke down.
