Best friend recalls riverside trauma...

Sitting on the riverbank yards from where Kyle entered the water, Simon's eyes begin to well up as he recalls how he couldn't watch after Kyle fell as he went into the river and then came up again - only he was unconscious and face down.

Just minutes earlier the young lads had been in the sports field nearby "just being boys", he said.

Asked how he was feeling Simon goes quiet before saying: "I dunno hey. I seen it".

"He went in just over there," he said, pointing before adding: "Just there by the rock where the wee bushes are there. The policeman says to him 'Don't be stupid son' and he just jumped. He went in and he went under the water and he came back up. He was unconscious and he went back underneath and I left. I could'nt...I..."

Grappling for words to express how he felt Simon could not continue for a moment.

Everything

He said he had known Kyle from the day the young boy had moved from Ballyclare to Tullyally and joined Lisneal College: "I was in Third Year and he was in First Year," he said, adding:"He meant everything to me as a friend. I was with him all the time. Every day he would ring me, like."

Simon described Kyle as a 'real Rangers fan' and went on to thank the staff at the YMCA for bringing down food to him and the other young folk who had kept the night vigil at the riverside immediately after the accident.

"It was good to see them come down and teachers from Lisneal came down as well," he said, casting his gaze into the water.

"I got a couple of hours sleep this morning, but I never slept the night before. This morning I just woke up and came back down here again," he said.

Simon said Kyle had made friends easily and loved to "joke about" and he would forever remember him for "what he got up to, and having a laugh and being a boy and messing about".

"He was up for anything, like, but see if he said anything and he thought he had hurt you he would have been 'Oh hi, I'm sorry'. He would never say a wrong word to you, ever," Simon says, falling silent again, before adding: "There's nothing you can say. There was nothing I could have done. I couldn't even watch it... It hasn't really hit me yet, I just cannot believe it."