Tuesday of last week was a typical busy day at Milton Keynes Central rail station, 80 km north of London.
But for one deeply troubled Irishman it would also be his last. David Joyce (38), originally from Galway, was shot dead by Thames Valley police.
Milton Keynes, a city of 270,000 people, was developed from scratch in the Buckinghamshire countryside mostly between the 1970s and 1990s to relieve congestion in London. It is primarily known by many in Britain for its pre-planned architectural blandness, a hotbed of not very much. Violent crime rates, however, are higher than the UK average.
The events of April 1st leading to the fatal shooting of Joyce can be mapped out from information provided by the UK police and the independent British office that investigates police conduct, as well as from evidence heard at a preliminary coroner’s hearing in Milton Keynes on Thursday.
A member of the public called 999 at lunchtime on the day to report a man at the station entrance with a firearm.
The call was no April Fool’s, but the information was inaccurate. There was no gun.
Armed officers arrived at about 1.04pm and saw a man fitting the description given. It was Joyce. He had no gun, but was holding a knife. He had a long history of mental illness including paranoia, stretching back to his teenage years near Galway city.
Joyce was known to some in the local police force. They had previously arrested him as recently as February. He had also served time in prison for previous offences involving possession of modified firearms. He flaunted an interest in guns on social media. But he had never harmed anyone.
According to the official account, Joyce, who was a very slight man, ran towards police outside the station. An armed officer fired a single shot, hitting him in the stomach. He fell to the pavement.
Officers and medical staff tried in vain to save him at the scene but he was pronounced dead at 1.44pm where he lay on the ground, near a Pret-a-Manger cafe.
As Joyce had a criminal record, he was formally identified by police in the morgue of Milton Keynes University Hospital using his fingerprints.
It was a sad end for an ill man who had a hard life. An Irishman born on St Patrick’s Day, Joyce seemed somewhat estranged from the land of his birth.
On Tuesday at lunchtime, exactly one week after his death, commuter life again trundled on as normal at Milton Keynes Central. People walked over the spot where Joyce was shot and died.
There was no moment’s pause at 1.04pm, nothing laid in Joyce’s memory. The only evidence of what happened were three yellow signs outside the station appealing for witnesses, affixed on behalf of the Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC) to poles near where Joyce fell.
A rail enforcement officer said the signs were put up this week. While The Irish Times observed them over the course of more than an hour on Tuesday afternoon, barely anyone stopped to read them.
Many of the commuters would have known little about what had happened. They might have known from the yellow signs that there had been “a fatal shooting”, although not by whom. If they read newspapers they might also have known that Joyce had a knife.
They likely would not have known of Joyce’s long history of mental health difficulties. Nor would they have known of his apparent sense of isolation.
Joyce had lived in Milton Keynes, far from his family in Ireland, for 15 years. He was a Traveller and also a gay man.
Some other gay Traveller men, such as UK-based internet personality Martin “Puff Daddy” Ward, have spoken publicly of the difficulties they experienced in the conservative Traveller community when their sexuality emerged.
In Milton Keynes, Joyce was in a long-term and seemingly loving relationship with another man, although a source said his life could sometimes be “turbulent”. They lived together in a flat in Brookside, Hodge Lea, a few kilometres west of Milton Keynes city centre. Joyce was not known among the local Irish community. Nor, it seems, did he associate much with local Travellers.
A source familiar with his life highlighted that two months before he was shot, Joyce had a separate standoff with Thames Valley police. In February, Joyce was said to have walked into a police station with a knife, but put it down when asked. He sought help for his mental health difficulties. He received some.
Joyce was sectioned for several weeks in February in the Campbell Centre, a local psychiatric unit on the same hospital campus where, a few weeks later, his body would be identified using fingerprints.
He was arrested upon his release from hospital at the end of February over the knife incident at the police station.
His final appearance at Aylesbury Crown Court came barely more than a week before he died. He had been out of prison only a few months, after being sentenced for firearms possession in mid-2022. This time, Joyce was due to serve a non-custodial sentence for the knife offence.
For a gay Traveller man with relentless mental health difficulties, the banality of Milton Keynes may have provided a sort of anonymous sanctuary for Joyce.
Brookside is a modest, ordinary development of brown-brick flats and houses, mostly council flats and terraced houses. It lies just off the busy A5 road, sandwiched between an industrial estate and a golf complex.
Many of Joyce’s former neighbours did not want to talk about him this week, but a few did. One man suggested that Joyce, while basically harmless, had a habit of smoking cannabis.
Following his release from prison, whenever he emerged from his flat it was usually to walk up the hill to the local shop, Hodgelea Food and Wine. Arun, who worked behind the counter, recalled Joyce as basically a “very nice guy – skinny, always wearing T-shirts”.
“Sometimes he would ask for something and pay later if he did not have enough money. If he was only 10p short, I would tell him not to worry. A few of the people who come into this shop, they take this or that. Never him. He never took anything without permission,” said the shopkeeper.
Arun said that if there were people arguing or causing bother outside the shop, Joyce would simply walk around them.
“He never got involved in anything like that.”
He said that after the shooting, police came to Joyce’s flat down the hill to put up tape around the scene as they searched it.
“I don’t know what he was doing with that knife,” he said.
Arun described the fatal shooting as “very sad”.
Brookside was quiet whenever The Irish Times visited it over several days this week. There were a few old people walking their dogs – a retirement home sits within the estate. The number 33 bus occasionally rolled by on its way to Milton Keynes. Joyce just blended into the landscape.
His mental health difficulties emerged when he was younger in Galway. He attended schools including Scoil Chaitríona in Renmore and also, for a period, St Mary’s College in Galway.
Galway man Joe Loughnane knows all about the tragedy that can befall men with persistent mental health problems.
Eight weeks ago, his younger brother Adam Loughnane took his own life in Galway, after walking out of the local hospital emergency department where he had sought help for his ongoing issues.
Loughnane says he went to school with Joyce and was the same age as him. While he is clear that he did not know him very well, Loughnane said he knew enough about him to now understand a similarity between the suffering of Joyce and Loughnane’s late brother Adam.
After not having seen Joyce for several years, Loughnane said he encountered him one day “drinking cans” at Spanish Arch in Galway when they were both in their early 20s; it must not have been very long before Joyce moved to Milton Keynes.
“I sat with him for a while. We had a chat. He was excitable, quick-witted.”
Back in Milton Keynes, Thursday’s preliminary review hearing held by the senior coroner for the city, Tom Osborne, heard from an official that Joyce’s grieving family back in Ireland knew of the hearing, but had decided not to attend or tune in by video link – nor had the police.
The Irish Times was the only other attendee, apart from Osborne and the other official. The other 39 seats in public gallery were empty for the five-minute hearing.
The coroner heard that David Michael Patrick Joyce’s body had been released to his family. He had not yet been buried and would be repatriated to Ireland, the official said. The coroner opened the inquest and adjourned it to October 7th.
He suggested that the IOPC investigation might not be over by then, but he didn’t want the case to be set aside for a date too far out “in the ether”.
The Irish Times was unable to contact Joyce’s family this week, as they grappled with his tragic loss.
On a final visit to Brookside after the coroner’s hearing on Thursday, there was no answer at the council flat where Joyce’s partner apparently still lived.
“Why don’t you leave him alone?” said a neighbour, a middle-aged woman across the street, presumably referring to Joyce’s partner as she nodded towards the flat window.
She said Joyce “had a good heart” and agreed he had a hard life.
“But he hasn’t done anything wrong,” she said, nodding towards the window again.
“All that has happened is that he has lost somebody.”
* To contact Samaritans email jo@samaritans.ie or call 116 123
