Boy aged 9 died after falling from toppling locker
A YOUNG boy died after a locker he was climbing on in a school changing room toppled over, an inquest heard yesterday.
Leo Latifi, nine, banged his head on a bench when the 6fttall unit shifted as he clambered on to it after attending a swimming club.
The schoolboy’s father, Eduart, had been watching his younger son swim and rushed in with other fathers when they heard the commotion.
Emergency services were called but Leo died in hospital later that evening.
The cause of death was recorded as a severe head injury.
The site manager of Great Baddow High School in Chelmsford, Essex, told the inquest jury yesterday new vinyl flooring had been put in by a contractor and he had ‘never had any cause’ to check if the lockers were secure. A transcript of a police interview with a friend of Leo’s – the only other boy in the changing rooms at the time – was read out at the hearing.
He said Leo was ‘climbing lockers and I was at the bottom’, adding: ‘He was at the top in the middle. We were chatting and then I felt it going back so I jumped off and went to the side of it.’ Leo ‘tried to put one foot down but he couldn’t, then his head hit the bench’.
Questioned about whose idea it had been to scale the unit, which was 5ft wide, around 1.5ft deep and contained 15 lockers in total, the boy added: ‘Well, Leo had climbed them before and he mentioned it and started going and I was at the bottom chatting.’
Leo was not a pupil at the school where the accident happened on the afternoon of May 23 last year. Site manager Mark Buxton told the hearing in Chelmsford that the changing rooms were refurbished in 2005-6 and new vinyl flooring was put down in 2013-14.
He thought the contractor had left the lockers in place and ‘cut around’ them to install the floor.
‘It wasn’t until after the incident that I saw the vinyl had been laid to the end of the wall and an indent of the locker base was visible,’ he said. The changing room lockers ‘looked to have integrity, they looked to be robust. I’ve never really had any cause to look at them for maintenance’, he added.
Asked by Matthew Flynn, representing Leo’s family, whether the fixtures on the lockers had been inspected, Mr Buxton said: ‘No, they were not checked. I didn’t know they had fixings.’
Paul Draper, the school’s business manager, said the lockers had been assessed as ‘stable, secure and fit for purpose’.
He told the inquest he did not check for fixings to the wall during an audit in 2017 but added: ‘I tried to move it. I’m 17 stone. I couldn’t move it.’ Asked if there was anything the school could have done differently, he replied: ‘To be honest, probably not.’
After the incident the school ‘took precautionary action to secure everything to the wall, whether it was needed or not’.
‘As a result of such a tragic incident you do everything in your power to make sure it’s never going to happen again,’ Mr Draper said.
Leo lived with his father, 38, mother Natalie, 31, and brother in a flat near his school, St Michael’s Church of England Junior.
Teachers stood outside the gates last year to break the news of the tragedy to parents and pupils. Shocked friends and locals left floral tributes outside.
Headteacher Maria Rumsey described Leo at the time as a ‘sparkle in our school’ who would be ‘greatly missed by all’.
The inquest, which is due to last four days, continues.
‘I felt it going back so I jumped off’