Daddy’s dead, Daddy's dead... mother relives family speed boat horror
A WOMAN whose husband and daughter were killed in a speedboat tragedy told yesterday how she heard one of her children screaming: ‘Daddy’s dead, Daddy’s dead.’
Victoria Milligan, her husband Nick and their four children were thrown into the water when the couple lost control of their boat, which then raced round in circles and inflicted terrible injuries on the family.
Mr Milligan and the couple’s eightyear-old daughter Emily were killed. Mrs Milligan lost a leg and their son Kit was also hit by the boat’s propeller and needed 12 operations to save his leg.
Describing how an idyllic family holiday in Cornwall turned to horror, Mrs Milligan, 40, said: ‘I have never felt more helpless. My family was in extreme danger. There was nothing I could do.
‘I grabbed my four-year-old son, Kit, who was near me. He was screaming, “No more cold water, Mummy, no more cold water!”
‘I hadn’t factored in how hard it is to swim in a life jacket, so we didn’t move very far, but just far enough to save both our lives. When the boat came around a second time, we were just outside the circle, and I felt the hull hit
‘Now I know I am the lucky one’
my chest – but what I didn’t feel was the propeller cutting my leg.’
Mrs Milligan said a watersports instructor and three canoeists risked their own lives to stop the speedboat and rescue the family, but she then heard her eldest daughter cry out that her father had been killed.
Writing in the Sunday Times, she said: ‘I remember my 12-year- old, Amber, in the water screaming “Daddy’s dead, Daddy’s dead”, her face covered in blood from her injured hand. I remember the most basic of all human instincts, survival, kicking in.
‘Lying in the water, dipping into unconsciousness having lost a lot of blood, I was figuring out how I was going to look after the children on my own; I’d put the house on the market, buy a smaller one. It still surprises me how strong that practical survival instinct is.’
The family from Wandsworth, South London, had travelled to Cornwall in May 2013 for a bank holiday weekend in their holiday home near St Enodoc, and took their speedboat out into the Camel estuary for a day trip.
Mrs Milligan said her husband, 51, a senior executive at Sky Media, had dis- connected the boat’s ‘kill cord’ – a safety device that stops the power if the driver is thrown – while he retrieved his sunglasses from the back of the boat.
When he then put the boat in a steep turn – possibly as the result of slipping while helping his wife to steer – the family were thrown overboard without being able to stop the engine.
By the time the boat had been stopped, all six members of the family had been struck by the boat or its propeller. Mrs Milligan said she only learned Emily had been killed after she had been taken to hospital.
Mrs Milligan’s left leg was so badly injured that doctors amputated it below the knee, but they were able to save Kit’s leg after 12 operations. Amber and her other daughter, Olivia, then aged ten, suffered relatively minor injuries.
In the aftermath of the accident, Mrs Milligan was so overwhelmed by grief that she wished she had been killed.
‘Long-term plans for our future have very suddenly been taken away and I must make new ones,’ she wrote.
‘After the accident I thought Nicko was the lucky one, as he didn’t have to feel any of the indescribable pain I was feeling. I hate to admit it, but I wished it had been me that had been killed. Now I know I am the lucky one as I get to see our children grow up.’
Mrs Milligan, a personal trainer, now walks with a prosthetic leg. She said caring for her surviving children had helped her to cope with her grief.
She has helped to raise £750,000 for Child Bereavement UK, the Royal National Lifeboat Institution and the Cornwall Air Ambulance and is writing a book about the tragedy and its aftermath to help other families to cope with bereavement. An inquest into the deaths opens in Truro today.