Dylan Bragger had everything in front of him. At the age of 15, he was training to be a mechanic and was well-liked. His family described him as a “big friendly giant with a heart of gold.”
His mum Sarah said her son “was a boy who would light up the room when he walked in, he would have you laughing until you couldn’t breathe. He told us he loved us every day.” Not long before he was killed on June 29, 2023 in Lancashire Dylan had called his mum to arrange a lift home. Tragically he never made it.
He was standing on a footbridge with his older cousin Keagan when they were ambushed by Felipe Figueiredo – a heavy-set man. Not only was he a decade older than Dylan, he was armed with a ferocious weapon.
The boys desperately scrambled down the embarkment from the bridge in a bid to get away from him, only for Figueiredo to catch up with them. He stabbed Dylan 23 times and left him for dead, Manchester Evening News reported.
The black blade severed the teenager’s jugular vein and vagus nerve. After killing Dylan, he chased Keagan onto the dual carriageway, holding the murder weapon behind him. The first words he said were: “You stole my wife’s motorbike.”
Figueiredo lived with his family on the nearby estate. Each day his wife would cycle 40 minutes each way to her job as a special needs teaching assistant. In the days before the attack which saw her husband jailed for life, they had bought a 50cc scooter on finance, to make her journeys easier.
Before they even had a chance to insure it the bike was stolen from outside their home, prompting Figueiredo to post on a local Facebook group asking if anyone knew where it might be.
By June 29, he had been told two youngsters, described as “young rats – North Face ninja types” had been seen riding the bike – and an orange Repsol bike – in the area.
Figueiredo replied on the post that he would go and “have a look” before arming himself with a large knife, carrying it in a sheath down his trousers. He had spotted the bike shortly before coming across.
When Keagan realised his cousin had been caught, he attempted to run back up the embankment to help him, only for Figueiredo to brandish the blade at him. Keagan backed away onto the dual carriageway, and having gained enough distance, he took out his phone and filmed the man who was approaching him, shouting: “You f***ing animal”.
Figueiredo tucked the knife back into the waistband of his pants and returned home. At some point, he disposed of the knife in a bid to destroy evidence, but the sheath of the knife fell from his pocket and was found on the round, yards from Dylan’s body.
Back at the house, Figueiredo called 999 and told a ‘cock and bull story’, claiming the youngsters had come at him with the knife. The killer claimed he had wrestled it from Dylan, stabbing him a couple of times in the tussle.
The story proved unconvincing to the jury, who unanimously found him guilty of murder in three hours. There was no evidence that either Dylan or Keagan had been carrying a blade, despite Figueiredo’s belief that “these young fellas always have knives on them.”
At Preston Crown Court, Dylan’s family listened as the harrowing circumstances of their beloved son and brother were laid bare. His mum Sarah said: “Yes he was not perfect but he did not deserve this. No one had the right to take him away from us.
“Since our boy was brutally taken from us, our whole family is broken, and no sentence will ever be enough. Nothing will serve as justice. It is impossible. Imagine your child being in the house, only two hours before, speaking with him minutes before he died to arrange to pick him back up and him just never returning.
“To later learn that a grown man had so brutally taken him from us, every minute of very day, we think of how scared Dylan was in the last moments of his life and this is going to haunt us forever. Listening to the extent of his injuries in court was gut-wrenching – far worse than we could ever have imagined.
“To hear that he suffered most of these injuries in life distresses us even further. Our whole family, his friends, the whole community have been affected by Dylan’s vicious murder.
“No-one should have any family member subjected to such a brutal crime. These injuries were so horrific they left our boy unable to fight back, and sat listening to details in court, it sounds like he was butchered like an animal.
“Inflicted with so many injuries – imagine the pain and the trauma he suffered. We see his face every night when we try and sleep with visions of him being attacked haunting us all. The last six months have been horrific – the worst six months of our lives.
“We’re now left to try and rebuild what was a great family unit that will simply never be the same and might never recover from this. Not being able to work, eat, sleep, or sometimes just have a normal conversation. Normal is not a word we will ever be able to describe our family again.
“I would serve a life sentence myself if it meant I could have my boy back. Dylan, I really hope you are resting in peace now boy. We miss you.”
Source: animalheaven.us
