Family of Stanley Metcalf, 6, who was accidentally shot dead by his great-grandfather, has been torn apart by his refusal to apologise for the tragedy

• The Grannons were remembering the death of family member Andrew last year 
• On the same day Sam Grannon shot and killed his six-year-old great-grandson  
• Grannon, 78, fired a modified air rifle into Stanley Metcalf’s stomach, killing him
• He has never apologised for the incident and has been sent to jail for three years 

Stanley Metcalf was killed by his great-grandfather Albert ‘Sam’ Grannon

On the day his six-year-old great-grandson was killed, emotions were already running high at Sam Grannon’s East Yorkshire home.

The 78-year-old retired ship worker had gathered his family to remember his youngest son Andrew – a fireman who died at 40 of a brain aneurism 15 years previously.

The Grannons liked to remember Andrew on his birthday and that day last year – July 26 – marked what should have been his 55th. But within a matter of hours, a horrific turn of events resulted in a tragedy even more agonising than the one they had endured a decade and a half earlier.

By the end of it, Sam’s great-grandson Stanley lay dead, killed by a pellet from a .22-calibre air rifle which the pensioner had kept at the house. Yesterday, almost a year to the day after Stanley’s death, Grannon was sentenced to three years in jail after pleading guilty to manslaughter by gross negligence and the unauthorised possession of a firearm.

But amid divided loyalties and scenes of high family drama at Hull Crown Court, Stanley’s mother – who is Grannon’s grand-daughter – revealed she had still not received an apology from her grandfather for killing her son in a moment of criminal recklessness.

Despite admitting that she felt sorry for the pensioner immediately after the accident, 41-year-old Jenny Dees told the court: ‘I don’t feel sorry for him now.’

Placing a photograph of Stanley in front of her in the witness box, she added: ‘Not once did he say sorry. Now, if he did, it would be meaningless. Too little, too late.’

While she and her 41-year-old partner Andy Metcalf, Stanley’s father, were supported by several family members, others displayed unerring loyalty towards Grannon. One of his daughters shouted: ‘I love you, Dad!’ as the pensioner was led, stony-faced, to the cells.

With the two opposing sides of the family kept apart by court officials, it is clear that, above all, Stanley’s untimely and tragic death has wrenched apart this once close-knit family.

While Grannon’s wife, Jennifer, and several close family members are standing by him, others find themselves unable to forgive his apparent lack of remorse, his refusal to apologise or to take responsibly for his actions and his initial bid to absolve himself of blame by telling police the gun had discharged by itself and the bullet had ricocheted into his grandson’s stomach from the floor.

Grannon with his wife Jennifer taken on a cruise ship. Grannon has been sent to jail for three years

The truth is, he had been pointing it at him with unbelievable recklessness.

The illegal £90 airgun which Grannon kept loaded on a shelf behind a curtain in the kitchen at his home in the village of Sproatley had been modified to make it more powerful so he could shoot vermin. He didn’t apply for a firearms certificate because he knew that he wouldn’t get one. He was right-handed but an old injury to his hand meant he had to use the gun in his left.

Stanley’s death may have been an accident, but it might so easily have been avoided.

Yesterday, the court heard for the first time the details of the final moments of the little boy’s life.

Stanley asked if he could see the gun, and the two of them went inside, leaving the rest of the family in the garden. Moments later, there was a loud bang as the ‘specially dangerous’ air gun discharged, sending a pellet ripping through Stanley’s stomach and severing an artery.

Among the final words spoken by the bewildered little boy was the question: ‘Why have you shot me, Grandad?’ Yesterday, Mr Justice Lavender asked the same thing: ‘Why on earth did you do it?’ Yet despite asking Grannon’s lawyer to make one last effort to get Grannon to give a full account of himself, no such explanation was forthcoming. It was left to his solicitor, Paul Genney, to explain that the pensioner had squeezed the trigger to check if the gun was loaded while pointing the gun at Stanley ‘not, of course, deliberately’.

For Stanley’s parents and his twin sister Elsie, the agony has been relentless. Some of Stanley’s ashes have been placed inside a teddy bear so his bereft sister can keep him by her side. Relatives say that Jenny, who appeared on Britain’s Got Talent in 2015 as part of the comic amateur burlesque group Ruby Red, often cries herself to sleep.

Stanley’s mother Jenny Dees (pictured outside court) told the hearing that not once did Grannon apologise for killing her son

‘It really isn’t getting any easier to deal with,’ she wrote on Facebook this month. ‘I just can’t understand why you are not with me. I love you, I took care of you and I tried to keep you safe! You are my life, Stanley. My whole world has been destroyed.’

A pupil at St Mary’s Queen of Martyrs Academy in Hull, Stanley was barely a week into the summer holidays. He and Elsie had spent the afternoon at a birthday party with their parents before the family drove to Sproatley.

Up until that day, Jenny enjoyed a good relationship with her grandparents, meeting up with them socially and often leaving loving messages on Grannon’s Facebook page, as she did when Sam and Jennifer celebrated their diamond wedding anniversary just a couple of months earlier – an event marked with a card from the Queen.

Unaware that her grandfather kept a dangerously modified air rifle at his home, she had no idea her precious son was in any danger from the very people with whom he should have been safe.

Jenny with Stanley. Friends say that the bereaved mother often cries herself to sleep these days

Why Grannon had such a weapon – and, more importantly, why he modified it – is a question which deeply troubles Stanley’s parents and those family members supporting them.

‘If he just wanted to kill rats or birds, he would not have needed to modify it,’ Stanley’s uncle Stewart Campbell told the Mail.

He and Stanley’s parents are campaigning for tougher laws to control ownership and use of air guns. Mr Campbell, a pub landlord, said he had been assured by MPs that a review of powered weapons was under way.

It was at around 4pm that the peaceful lane outside Grannon’s £200,000 home was shattered by screams.

As paramedics arrived at the house, a neighbour was seen standing in the street shouting that ‘something terrible has happened’. Stanley, who had a wound the size of a 5p piece in his abdomen, was taken to Hull Royal Infirmary but deteriorated in the ambulance and died later that evening.

Police immediately launched an investigation into the shooting, taping off the house while forensic officers examined the scene. While an initial statement said that ‘indications are that this was a tragic accident involving a pellet gun’, forensic tests quickly revealed that the gun could not have gone off on its own and the bullet had not ricocheted. Grannon had pointed the gun at Stanley.

Grannon showed an apparent lack of remorse after killing Stanley, according to some around him

The shipyard welder’s son, who was given his father’s name – Albert William Grannon – when he was born in 1941, is a well-known and colourful figure, not only in Sproatley where villagers recall how he often dressed in his Sunday best to go to the pub but kept his slippers on, but also in Hull circles, particularly among the maritime world where he spent his entire professional life. In 2017, he self-published a memoir.

He and Jennifer were childhood sweethearts who met at Beattie’s newsagent in Hull where Grannon worked as a paperboy and Jennifer as a shop assistant. They were just 16 when they married at Hull Registry Office in 1958 and their eldest child, Kathryn – Jenny’s mother – arrived the same year.

Grannon went on to became a boiler maker at Brigham and Cowan shipyard before moving to Drypool Engineering, where he worked as a superintendent in ship management, a job which saw him travel all over the world.

The couple had five children – Kathryn, Christine, Richard, Andrew, who died in 2003, and Jane – eight grandchildren and 11 great-grandchildren, including Stanley.

But in the months that followed Stanley’s death, Grannon’s demeanour – particularly his apparent lack of remorse – was seen by some as arrogance.

Those close to Stanley’s parents were particularly offended by a photograph Grannon posted on Facebook just before Christmas last year. The photo shows him and his wife celebrating on board a luxury cruise liner. He is wearing a white tuxedo. Jennifer is dressed in a long white evening gown.

Stanley with Jenny, his father Andy and sister Elsie. Stanley and Elsie were twins

The photograph of the smiling couple was posted on December 22 – just a day after what would have been Stanley’s seventh birthday. At the same time that Grannon and his wife were on the cruise, Stanley’s grieving parents were doing their best to help Elsie cope as she faced her first birthday and first Christmas without the brother she adored.

Thousands of people in Hull, who had seen photographs of the little girl travelling alongside Stanley’s coffin on a horse and carriage at his funeral, voted for Elsie to switch on the city’s Christmas lights.

Speaking to the Hull Daily Mail at the time, Jenny – who also has a grown-up son and daughter from a previous relationship – said: ‘She talks about him all the time and talks about how she looks into the sky to see if she can see his star that has been named after him. She tells me that everything she does now is to make her brother proud.’

This month will mark another painful milestone – the first anniversary of Stanley’s death – and, as the weeks go by, it is clear that those who loved him most of all are still weighed down with grief, struggling to find moments of happiness amid a sea of devastation and loss. Their sorrow has no doubt been compounded by the amount of time it took Grannon to admit his guilt, a delay which left Jenny and Andy in an agonising limbo for months.

Stanley’s aunt Lisa Metcalf Campbell took to Facebook to express her rage: ‘No remorse from the day he killed him, never once apologised and still no remorse today in court from the man who took away my nephew’s life and destroyed our family.

‘No remorse from his family who still chose to stand by him today. Shame on you!’

Losing a child in any circumstances is not something that a parent can ever truly recover from. But what makes Stanley Metcalf’s tragic death even harder to bear is the deep family divisions it has caused and the painful scars of betrayal it has left behind.

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