Dylan Bragger had everything in front of him. Aged 15 he was training to be a mechanic.
Friends on his course described him as friendly and helpful. To his family, he was a “big friendly giant with a heart of gold.”
“Dylan was a boy who would light up the room when he walked in, he would have you laughing until you couldn’t breathe”, his mum Sarah said. “He told us he loved us every day.”
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On June 29, 2023, Dylan left his family home in Skelmersdale at around 7.30pm. He spent time with his older cousin Keagan and called his mum around 8:45pm to arrange a lift home. Tragically, he never made it.
As Dylan and Keagan stood by a footbridge which crossed Digmoor Road, they were ambushed by Felipe Figueiredo – a heavy set man, a decade older than Dylan, who was armed with a ferocious weapon. As the boys scrambled down the embankment to get away, Figueiredo caught up with Dylan and launched a vicious attack, inflicting 23 deadly knife wounds.
The black blade severed the teenager’s jugular vein and vagus nerve, as the attacker launched blow after to blow on the defenceless teen. 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 was a family man, who lived on the Birleywood estate with his wife and five-year-old daughter. His wife, a special needs teaching assistant, cycled 40 minutes each way to her job, often in poor weather. 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.
But before the couple had paid it off – or even insured it, the bike was stolen from outside their home. Angered and inconvenienced, Figueiredo posted on the Skelmersdale First Facebook page, asking for information. 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 he would go and “have a look”. He armed himself with a large knife, with a pointed blade and teeth, which he carried in a sheath down his trousers. Shortly before coming across Dylan and his cousin, he spotted the bike.
As he launched at the boys, the pair scrambled down the embankment, through thick bushes, but when Keagan reached the bottom, he realised Dylan had been caught. As he tried to get back to his cousin, Figueiredo waved the knife at him to warn him off.
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 of the horrific attack he had just inflicted, 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. He claimed he had wrestled it from Dylan and stabbed him ‘a couple of times’.
However the evidence was overwhelming. The jury took just three hours to unanimously find him guilty of murder. There was no evidence that either Dylan or Keagan had been carrying a knife, despite Figueiredo’s belief that “these young fellas always have knives on them.” With this in mind, the killer had armed himself, knowing he was going to approach two youngsters in an isolated location.
At Preston Crown Court, Dylan’s family listened as the harrowing circumstances of their beloved son and brother were laid bare. When the extent of his injuries was described in graphic detail, Dylan’s mother left court to vomit.
She said she, and the rest of her family, are haunted by the pain and suffering her son went through in his final moments. “Yes he was not perfect but he did not deserve this”, she said. “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.”
William Turner is a seasoned U.K. correspondent with a deep understanding of domestic affairs. With a passion for British politics and culture, he provides insightful analysis and comprehensive coverage of events within the United Kingdom.
