Four years ago, Paula and Ben Overton were enjoying married life and saving towards buying their first home when a devastating message appeared on Paula’s phone.
‘It was just normal day. Ben gave me a kiss on the forehead and went off to work. He messaged me during the day to let me know that he’d booked some annual leave around my birthday, so that we could go to Cyprus,’ Paula remembers.
The pair first met in college in Horsham in 2010 at ages 16 and 17 after being set up by a mutual friend, staying together when Paula went 150 miles away to university in Loughborough.
They then travelled Europe and Japan together in January 2019 before tying the knot in the November ages 25 and 26, honeymooning in the Canary Islands the following month.
The pair did ‘everything together’, from weekly walks to regular date nights, sharing a love of trying out new restaurants, with tech-enthusiast Ben even building Paula’s computer.
But all that changed on February 9 2022, when Ben, who was 29 at the time, began cycling home from his job as a store manager.
He was killed in a head-on smash with a car on a small country road in Crawley, Sussex.
Paula, now 32, went into panic mode after she received an automated text message from her husband’s Garmin watch, telling her he had been involved in an accident.
‘I would finish work and get home before him, so I went for a bath. I was laid in the bath, when my phone went. It was this automated message that said, “Benjamin Overton’s Garmin device has detected an incident”. Then it gave me the coordinates.’
‘I thought it was a really weird message to receive so I decided to check a tracking app we had for each other called Life 360.
‘Normally it showed a map, and it had a little pinpoint where Ben was. I expected that pinpoint to be moving along, but it was just stationary in the middle of the road.
‘I thought his phone could have fallen out his pocket or he could have been in an accident.