Girl, three, ‘died when inflatable exploded’
A Three-year-old girl died after being catapulted 20ft into the air when an inflatable trampoline exploded, an inquest has heard.
Ava-may Littleboy was thrown “higher than a house”, landing face down on the beach at Gorleston-on-sea in Norfolk.
Chloe Littleboy, her mother, described having to watch onlookers try to resuscitate her daughter. “I stood there shaking and screaming,” she said in a statement. “I kept saying they were doing compressions on her too hard.”
At the hospital, Ms Littleboy and Nathan Rowe, Ava-may’s father, held her while medics tried to revive her.
Ms Littleboy, from Lower Somersham, Suffolk, went on: “When they said she was no longer alive, it felt my whole world had crashed. I just kept telling her I loved her again and again.”
Ava-may was at the beach with her parents in July 2018 when Abbie Littleboy, her aunt, took her to the inflatables. Ms Littleboy, 23, said she heard a loud bang “like someone had set off a cannon”, then saw Ava-may in the air.
“I remember looking at her little face and I think the force that sent her up had done something to her. It was like she was asleep,” she said.
Jacqueline Lake, the Norfolk senior coroner, said the inquest would hear evidence about the “acquisition of the inflatable trampoline, risk assessments, working practices at Johnson Funfairs Limited and the responsibilities and roles within that business”.
The inquest continues.