Escaping the burning Grenfell Tower with his pregnant wife and two daughters was the most terrifying experience of Marcio Gomes’ life.
The family, who lived on the 21st floor of the building, were rushed to hospital in the middle of the night and pregnant Andreia was put in an induced coma being treated for cyanide poisoning. Their two daughters were unconscious.
Everything was ready for the birth of the couple’s first son, including a message that had been painted on the nursery wall. But just hours after escaping the burning building, Marcio was told the baby, already named Logan, had been stillborn.
“I held my son in my arms, hoping it was all a bad dream, wishing, praying for a miracle, that he would open his eyes, move, make a sound,” Marcio said through tears at the inquest, per BBC.
On Wednesday June 14th 2017, the 24-storey apartment block went up in flames after a fridge reportedly blew up on the 4th floor. The final death toll sits at 71.
In the aftermath, survivors told their harrowing stories of escape, including Micky Paramasivan, who says he, his partner, and their five-year-old daughter were lucky to get out alive.
“I was dozing in and out of sleeping, watching a film, when I could smell something plasticky,” Micky Paramasivan told This Morning.
“The panic set in so I peeped through the spy hole of the front door and there was smoke everywhere, there were a couple of neighbours in the corridor going, ‘get out [of] the flat’,” he continued.
Paramasivan then quickly woke up his partner Hannah, 23, and then went into Thea’s bedroom, putting her under his dressing gown to protect her from the smoke and flames.
The five-year-old said there was “smoke everywhere” and she “could not breathe” as the made their way out of the building.
“When we got outside, there was plastic falling on the grass and people were crying and coughing. It was very scary,” she said.
“We were on the 7th floor and the fire started on the 4th floor, so as we’re going down the stairs it’s getting darker and darker and hotter and hotter. It was intense,” Paramasivan recalls. Within 15 minutes the whole tower was ablaze and there was no fire alarm, the fire alarm didn’t start going off until 4am and you could hear it loudly outside, but inside it was very quiet.”
The inquiry is set to establish the root causes of the fire from the tower’s history since it was built in 1974, eye-witness accounts, videos and photos.
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