The Hull Daily Examiner

A 16-year-old boy was fighting to recover in hospital last night after falling from the roof of a disused building in Hull city centre while attempting to swing across a gap on a web-like filament he had himself produced.

Tyler Brennan, from the Beverley Road area of west Hull, was taken to Hull Royal Infirmary by ambulance shortly after 9.10pm on Saturday. A Humberside Police spokesperson said his injuries were serious but not life-threatening, and that the incident was not being treated as suspicious.

‘He thought he could do what Spider-Man does’

Friends who had gone up onto the roof with him told the Examiner that Mr Brennan, a Year 11 pupil, had for several weeks been able to produce a length of strong, web-like filament from his wrists — an ability the Examiner is not in a position to verify, but which was witnessed independently by several of his peers and is understood to have been documented by the clinicians treating him.

The web held. His hands did not.

According to his friends, the ability had emerged after Mr Brennan was bitten by a spider at home in May. He had spent the intervening weeks practising — short swings from the garage roof, from a bus shelter on Beverley Road — all of which, they said, had gone without incident. Saturday night was to be the first large one.

“He could do it. That’s what’s awful. He’d been doing it all week.”

“He could do it. That’s what’s awful,” said Kyle Robson, 17, who had been on the roof with him. “He’d been doing it all week. Off the garage Tuesday, off the bus stop Wednesday. Small ones. They were grand. He wasn’t showing off and he wasn’t daft — he could just do it. Saturday he went a bit bigger, that’s all. Went bigger, and his hands couldn’t take the bigger one.”

On the downward arc, the full force of Mr Brennan’s body weight — close to three times his weight at the lowest point, according to one biomechanist — was carried through his palms. The filament, still bonded to the parapet above, tore free of his hands. He fell an estimated 30 feet into a service yard behind Scale Lane, where his friends raised the alarm and called 999.

‘Something has to give’

Mr Brennan suffered severe soft-tissue injuries to both hands and a dislocated shoulder. Hospital sources said the skin and tissue of both palms had been torn away from the underlying structure of his hands by the force of the filament — an injury, one clinician said, more commonly seen in industrial machinery accidents than in falls from height.

The trauma team that treated him has prepared a full clinical account of his injuries, including the mechanism by which they occurred, for publication in the British Medical Journal. Read the case report  ›

Hull University Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust confirmed that a teenage boy had been admitted via the major trauma pathway on Saturday night and remained in a serious but stable condition. A spokesperson said: “We are unable to comment on the care of individual patients.”

Dr Helen Aro, a reader in biomechanics at the University of Hull who was not involved in his treatment, said the forces involved were “wholly unsurprising” — and that the boy’s ability, remarkable as it was, had done nothing to protect him from them.

“He could produce a filament strong enough to carry him. That is not the same thing as being built to be carried by one,” she said. “A spider produces silk. A spider also has an exoskeleton, a distributed body mass, and eight points of attachment. Mr Brennan had the silk.”

The spider

The spider that bit Mr Brennan in May has been identified by Hull City Council’s pest control service as a false widow (Steatoda nobilis) — a species unrelated to the true widows, established in southern England for more than a century and spreading steadily north as winters warm. Its bite is painful but not dangerous.

Dr Aro said it was “genuinely unclear” why the bite had produced the effect it apparently had in Mr Brennan’s case. “What is clear is that whatever gave him the filament gave him nothing else,” she said. “No tougher skin, no stronger tendons, no spare points of attachment. The silk and nothing but the silk. For a nine-milligram spider that is a complete toolkit. For a sixty-three-kilogram boy it is a way to lose his hands.”

‘A magnet for years’

Residents living near the building said it had been accessible to children for years. “It’s been boarded up and broken into more times than I can count,” said Margaret Sowerby, 68, who lives opposite. “You’d see them up there of an evening. You’d shout, but they’d not listen. I’m just thankful the lad’s alive.”

Neighbours who know the family described Mr Brennan as a quiet boy who was always helping his mother. “He’s a good lad,” said one. “I just hope he pulls through.”

Calls to ‘ban the webs’

The story, shared more than 4,000 times on social media by Sunday evening, drew responses from across the country — many of them from well outside Hull.

Among them was a demand to ban false widow spiders outright. A petition posted to Change.org on Sunday afternoon, started by a resident of Solihull, calls on the Government to “have false widow spiders removed from all public spaces”. It had attracted 347 signatures by Monday morning.

One commenter, posting from Rotherham, wrote: “Should be banned.” See the comments  ›

Council and police

Hull City Council said the building’s owner had been contacted and that the authority’s building safety team would carry out an inspection this week. “We take the safety of young people extremely seriously,” a spokesperson said.

Humberside Police confirmed that a 16-year-old boy had fallen from a building in the city centre. “The incident is not being treated as suspicious,” a spokesperson said. “Enquiries are ongoing into the circumstances by which a number of young people came to be on the roof of a commercial premises.”

‘Grateful to everyone who helped him’

In a short statement issued through the hospital, Mr Brennan’s mother, Donna, said: “Tyler is receiving the best possible care, and we are grateful to everyone who helped him on Saturday night — the ambulance crew, the police, and the staff at the hospital. We would ask that our privacy be respected while he recovers.”

The Examiner will publish a further report in due course.