The dark side was displayed during the weekend when a small plaque and flowers were removed from a Meadow Lane memorial to 16-year old Sam Killopps who died there following a stabbing in 2002.

The good was seen on Tuesday when a man, having heard about the incident, searched for the heart-shaped plague, found it in shrubbery and returned it to the victim’s mother, Mrs Doreen Killopps.

She said, “It’s our memorial to Sam and it has been there for more than five years. Unfortunately it has been vandalised on a number of occasions, so much so that we ended up cementing it to the ground. But even that hasn’t stopped them.

HURT

“They’ve taken teddy bears. They’ve taken flowers. And this time they took the plaque itself, which hurt us a lot. For us, that’s like going to a graveyard and desecrating somebody’s headstone. They seem just to have taken it and tossed it away like it was nothing.

“I don’t know why anybody would do a thing like that. Do these people have no feelings? Can they not take a step back and put themselves in the family’s shoes? Is it that they don’t know or do they just not care about anybody else?”

Expressing her gratitude to the man who found the plaque and returned it to her, Mrs Killopps said, “We were just talking to him and when he heard what had happened, he and another man went looking for the plaque.

“They found it in bushes and brought it to me.

“I’m very grateful. I means a lot to me. It’s our reminder of somebody very dear to us. It’s a very personal memorial.

“All I know is that the man’s name is Stuart and he’s from George Street. I phoned him from the police station to say thank you and now I just want others to know that there are some very good people out there.

“Against that, there are some very nasty people, too, so if anybody saw the person or people who took the plaque and kicked or threw it into the bushes, I’d ask them to contact the police.”