'I'm walking from London to the West Midlands in memory of my beloved daughter with our friends'

Devoted dad Santino Sellick will lead a group of colleagues on a 124-mile walk over five days from Trafalgar Square in central London to his home in Codsall, starting on Thursday (January 2) with a planned finish on Tuesday (January 7) -  which would have been his daughter Maria's 21st birthday.

The walkers are taking a route over as straight a line as possible. They will have no support crew on the journey and will camp out wherever they stop each night, before arriving at Mr Sellick's home.

Maria died aged 17 on November 29, 2021, after she collapsed from a sudden cardiac arrest. Mr Sellick said the idea for the walk had come from a chat he had with Maria about how he'd walk any distance to come and see her.

He said: "When Maria was here, we used to have a lot of banter and if something like Eastenders was on, I'd always tell her that I'd walk from London for her and I wouldn't use any transport to do it as that's how much I love her and there'd be nothing holding me back.

"When the date for her 21st was coming up, I was thinking about what I could do to mark it which would be significant and this idea kept banging around in my head, so I decided that's what I would do and when I told my wife, she gave me the thumbs up for it."

Mr Sellick said that when he mentioned it to friends, he was surprised about the response - with many offering to join him on the walk or help out where they could. He discovered that the people joining him had all been through their own traumas and, as a result, a bond was formed.

He said: "One of the team is my next door neighbour, who had to stand on the side-lines and watch me and my family going through our grief, shock and pain when we lost Maria, so he came to me straightaway and said he wanted to be there.

"Other people on the walk have been through their own things, with one having a daughter with a hole-in-a-heart, which another lost his nephew at 15 from a motorcycle accident, so everyone's got their own reasons for being there.

"There's been some serious bonding and openness about what we've all been through and I've had post-traumatic stress that I suffer from and have suffered from since that day and talking about how it mentally affected me has been really helpful and left me feeling really excited about this adventure we're about to go on."

Walking for 10 hours each day in memory of Maria Sellick

The walk will see the team of Santino Sellick, Stefan Kalakari, Wayne Lacey, Dean Turner and Stefan Kolakovic start out early morning in Trafalgar Square and aim to cover 10 hours of walking each day, all while wearing hoodies and t-shirts with QR codes and details about the memorial walk.

It will also look to raise much-needed funds for a number of charities, including CRY (Cardiac Risk in the Young), A Child of Mine, Compton Care and Wightwick Hall High School, where Maria had been at school at the time of her death.

Mr Sellick said the training had been hard, but the team had been building up the miles over the last few weeks and were raring to go for January 2 and prepared for camping in some of the harshest weather of the year, and said that Maria would be very proud of what he was doing.

He said: "She'd probably say that I was mad, but it would bring a smile to her face, which is a smile I miss every day, and she would laugh, which was very infectious.

"It would make her very proud and I think that is worth the pain for me and for my team doing this walk."

To find out more about the walk and to donate, go to gofundme.com/f/marias-legacy-a-caring-and-loving-girl-missed-by-us-all