A 16-year-old schoolboy cowering behind a wooden fence saw a wounded man being shot and killed on the ground a few yards away, according to his evidence to the inquiry yesterday.
Mr Malachy Coyle said as shooting got closer, when British soldiers advanced into the Bogside on Bloody Sunday, January 30th, 1972, he ran across the car-park in the enclosed square of Glenfada Park North.
An older man pulled him behind a slatted fence and into the backyard of a house. They banged on the back door and window of the house but could not gain entry, so they crouched down in the yard.
Mr Coyle said when he looked out between the slats of the fence, he saw three people lying on the ground. The one who was closest to the fence seemed to be still alive.
The witness said this man, later identified as 22-year-old Mr Jim Wray, who was one of the 13 civilians killed on the day, looked up. "His body did not move, but his head moved and he looked up at us," he said. "He saw us through the slats and he said: 'I cannot move my legs, I cannot move my legs'."
"At that stage I got afraid for him and I said: 'Pretend you are dead. Pretend you are dead,' and just then, underneath his chest, bits of concrete just exploded, sort of. He let out a groan and his head went down quite slowly onto the pavement, and he did not move after that."
Mr Coyle said he knew the man was now dead, and he was sure that the shot that had caused sparks to fly from the pavement had killed him.
Seconds later he saw soldiers running into the car-park from the other end, all but one of them wearing helmets. The bareheaded one ran ahead of the others and discovered between 20 to 30 people hunched down for cover at the south gable end wall of Glenfada Park.
This soldier pointed his gun at the crowd and shouted loudly several times: "I'll shoot you, you Irish bastards. You Irish scum." The witness said: "I remember hearing a woman's, or young boy's voice crying out: 'Please don't shoot us'."
He said the soldier "was acting completely irrationally and could not stand still. He kept jerking about in a strange way. He was very angry (and) obviously totally out of control . . . I knew at once that he was very dangerous and that it was likely that he was going to kill someone at any minute."
The other soldiers came up behind and stood back a few feet.
"They did not have the same menacing presence as this boy - this boy was really scary," the witness said.