“I am broken”: A year on and still no justice for Grenfell fire victims

ENGLAND - For Miguel Alves, it doesn’t feel like it was a year ago that a fire gutted his London home and reduced much of it to ashes -- it feels a lot longer than that. Time has passed at a painfully slow pace for the 50-year-old chauffeur, who moved to London from Portugal. And he isn’t looking forward to Thursday, the first anniversary of the Grenfell Tower fire, which killed 72 people and left a community homeless and heartbroken. “That year it was so emotional all year round, but now is the worst time, because we have to remember everything,” Alves told CNN in a temporary flat, where he lives with his wife, son and daughter. “In one year, there’s been such a lot of things to deal with. It looks like two or three years.” Time is supposed to heal wounds, but for many Grenfell survivors and victims’ relatives, the anniversary is a reminder of just how little has been put right over the past year. Alves knows he is one of the luckier ones. He and his wife were returning home from dinner in the early hours of June 14 last year, and as they pushed number 13 in the elevator to get to their apartment, someone else ran in as the doors were closing and pushed the button for the fourth floor. It was there, low down in the 24-story building, that the fire had broken out, and it was during that quick stop that Alves and his wife saw and smelled the early signs of the blaze. Alves raced upstairs to get his daughter out of bed, and knocked on his neighbors’ doors to warn them. He thinks constantly about what might have happened if he and his wife had gone straight up to their apartment and to bed, unaware of the fire below. “Maybe I am not here to tell you the story,” he said. There are many stories of near misses like Alves’, but there are also those of the 72 people who didn’t make it. The public inquiry into the fire opened in earnest in late May with a week of testimony from family and friends to commemorate the dead. Each day began with 72 seconds of silence, and what ensued was a roller coaster of emotions -- grief, anger, and pride in the lives lived and then lost. Many victims came from abroad, moving to London in search of a better life. Among them was 23-year-old Syrian refugee Mohammad Al-Haj Ali, whose fiancée, Amal, said in a video tribute: “Right now when I think about my future, I don’t really see anything.” Mohammed Hakim lost all five members of his immediate family -- his mother, Rabia Begum, his father, Komru Miah, and his siblings, Husna Begum, Mohammed Hanif and Mohammed Hamid. His parents had immigrated to London from Bangladesh.

(CNN)