8-year-old Saffie Rose was ‘simply a beautiful girl in every aspect of the words.’ She, and many others, just wanted to have fun at a concert. And now, grief after she was murdered
They leave small footprints and big aching holes.
Even on the vast panorama of social media, there would have been so little to say beyond the everyday minutiae of lives that had stretched far into the future.
Hadn’t done their living yet, the young pop fans — many of them hardly more than little girls, some with mom or an older sibling in tow — who were among at least 22 killed and 59 injured Monday night at an Ariana Grande concert in Manchester.
Wearing the singer’s trademark kitten ears as joyful pink balloons rose to the ceiling in the stadium.
Leaving behind now the immeasurable loss of parents and friends and family.
Eight-year-old Saffie Rose Roussos, one of the youngest victims ever of terrorism in Britain, had gone to the concert with her mother, Lisa, and older sister, Ashlee, both reportedly being treated for their injuries at separate hospitals.
Look at the picture of that child, with her dimples and her wide-spaced sable eyes and just the trace of a smile.
Imagine that sweet innocent youngster, her slight body torn apart by a suicide attacker’s bomb, a 22-year-old man — as identified by police — who apparently waited outside the stadium doors to detonate the explosive strapped to his body just as all those happy concertgoers came streaming out into the street.
Saffie, among the first to be named by authorities, could have been your child or mine. The grief, the rage, of her death could have been yours or mine.
“Saffie was simply a beautiful little girl in every aspect of the words,” the head teacher at her primary school said Tuesday. “She was loved by everyone and her warmth and kindness will be remembered fondly. Saffie was quiet and unassuming with a creative flair. The thought that anyone could go out to a concert and not come home is heartbreaking.” An 8-year-old should not have to be
remembered. She should be here, babbling about seeing her idol live on the stage. Animated morning-after conversations; not mourning, not keening grief.
Girls and boys with braces on their teeth. Kids given tickets for Christmas, for their birthday. Excitedly counting down the days.
A homeless man told ITV Independent he’d pulled nails from the arms and faces of injured children before paramedics arrived at the scene.
“They needed the help, I’d like to think that someone would come and help me if I needed the help,” said Stephen Jones, 35. “It was just my instinct to go and help people out. We were having to pull nails out of their arms, and a couple out of this little girl’s face. Some lady, she got cut from her side, so my mate had to hold her legs up . . . we just held her legs up because we thought she was just going to bleed right out.
“If I didn’t help, I wouldn’t be able to live with myself for walking away and leaving kids like that. Just because I’m homeless it doesn’t mean that I haven’t got a heart and I’m not human still.”
For so many of these young people, it probably had been the first time they would have been allowed to spread their butterfly wings, their parents anxious, but you have to let them go out into the world some time. From the moment they took their first steps, letting go of a father’s hand, those kids have been moving toward maturity and independence. But they weren’t there yet. So terribly vulnerable to atrocity that couldn’t have been foreseen or prevented. Because how do you protect your precious child when nobody knows whence evil comes? A woman on the phone with CNN late Monday, her voice breaking with panic because she hadn’t been able to reach her 15-year-old daughter, Olivia Campbell, or the friend with whom the teen had attended the concert. Calls going directly to voice mail. Frantically calling hospitals and police while her husband raced to the scene, looking for his girl. “I’ll never let her out of my sight again,” the mom vowed. “How can people do this to innocent children?”
Because they are what’s most precious.
Across from the arena, parents who’d arranged to pick up their kids — bring them home safely — were plunged into horror, scanning faces, texting, phoning. Many would have been in constant contact with their sons and daughters. Call me every hour! I’m here, I’m outside.
They’ll identify their kids now in the morgue, numbingly setting about the terrible process of funeral arrangements. The luckier ones sit at the side of critical care beds, caressing cheeks. The luckiest of all were united with their children in crushing embraces.
We’ve been here, in this awful state of lamentation, so many times before. From the streets of New York, where the desperately seeking papered the city with photos of their missing loved ones after 9/11, to London in the distraught aftermath of the 7/7 bombing, and Paris, and Brussels, and Nice and a resort beach in Tunisia.
But, my God, he — or they, if this was an act directed by a terrorist group, as indeed Daesh has already claimed credit for Manchester — deliberately went after kids. Their abominations know no end. Their cult of death has no boundaries.
Yet this isn’t a point of nihilism unreached before in recent history. In Peshawar, 132 children slaughtered by Taliban as they sat for exams, in a co-ordinated assault two and a half years ago. The 276 female students kidnapped by Boko Haram, 82 of them freed this month, returned to their families with babies born to their militant abductors.
This “soldier of the Caliphate” — named by police as Salman Abedi — was Manchester-born and investigators will have to back track his narrative, how he got to the abyss of radicalized carnage, why he slipped through the fingers of U.K. counter- terrorism intelligence that has managed to avert bombing attacks on home soil since 7/7. How did he make, or obtain, what may have been a hydrogen peroxide-based bomb, highly unstable. If that type of a sophisticated improvised explosive device, then likely not assembled by a one-off lone assailant motivated and inspired by Daesh.
They’re in their thousands, the western terrorist recruits who’ve gone off to fight for the caliphate cause in Syria and Iraq, hundreds homeward bound as the pushback against Daesh has clawed back much of the militant-held territory but not leaving their vehemence and violence behind. Wreaking havoc, instead, from within, across Europe and the U.K. Richard Barrett, former director of Global Counter Terrorism Operations at MI6, Britain’s foreign intelligence agency, estimated that 400 jihadists who’ve returned from the Middle East are being monitored in Britain, with a further 600 who’d tried to join the fight but had been stopped.
Daesh has repeatedly urged followers to target anyone, anywhere, anyhow, to maximize the dread, the media coverage, the essence of terrorizing for all that politicians, haplessly attempting to bind a society’s wounds, insist we will not be tyrannized.
It’s a radical Islamist terrorism emanating outward from the Arab world, often funded and fuelled by a fundamentalist religious establishment. As abhorrent to most Muslims as everyone else. Just as there were Muslim doctors battling to save lives at Manchester hospitals and Muslim cab drivers scooping distraught adolescents away from the stampede around the arena.
Adults comforting teenagers comforting children.
Even for those who weren’t hurt, the trauma will linger.
As of last night, there was still no word on, for, or about Olivia Campbell.
Sobbing, her mother recounted on TV their last conversation on the phone Monday evening, Olivia so thrilled by the concert, just over the moon.
“Those were the last words I heard from her.
“I love her so much, I need her so much, she’s my baby.” Rosie DiManno usually appears Monday, Wednesday, Friday and Saturday.