UNFORGIVABLE
Sure of your child’s safety when they are with a friend’s family? These parents were. What unfolded was...
‘He said his equipment was all top-notch’
CHEEKY, affectionate and funny, the texts on Clive Gardner’s mobile phone are the sort so commonly exchanged between a 14-year-old daddy’s girl and a doting father. Full of smiling emojis, excited exclamation marks and text-speak, Emily’s messages are those of a happy, home-loving young girl.
There is one, however, that – while he cannot bear to delete it – causes anguish to wash over him every time he sees it.
‘This was the very last time I heard from Emily,’ he says, his voice wobbling, as he holds out his phone. ‘When I see this, I think it was some sort of premonition.’
On the screen is an emoji showing a huge surf wave. And beside it, a peaceful, sleeping face.
The text was sent at 9.10am on May 2 last year, little more than three hours before Emily was killed in a speedboat accident in a picturesque Devon harbour.
She was trapped beneath a sunken boat for 25 minutes as a lifeboat crew battled to free her.
It is a case which raises both troubling questions and dangerous emotions, and not just because of the loss to Mr Gardner and his wife Deborah.
The inquest heard that Emily had been wearing an outsized life vest which led to her death when it became snagged beneath the hull of the boat.
And the man responsible for giving her the ill-fitting vest, and for driving the boat at full speed into a 6ft wave, was Paul Pritchard, the father of Emily’s best friend, Holly. It was Emily’s first trip away from home.
‘We trusted Emily would be safe,’ says Clive. ‘The knowledge that she died when we were not there to protect her but were trusting those she was with, is unbearable.
‘No one can blame us for believing Emily wasn’t properly supervised. Nor the bitterness we feel towards Paul Pritchard. He was not blamed at the inquest. But we do blame him. It was the first time she had gone away without her mum and dad.’
It is easy to understand the anger that Clive and Deborah now feel, as well as the grief they share with their surviving children, Katie, now 12, and Todd, nine.
Emily had known Holly since they were two, but although Deborah and Clive were on friendly terms with the Pritchards, they didn’t consider them close friends.
Indeed, when Emily had asked her father if she could go on an overnight boat trip with the Pritchards, Clive wasn’t keen.
He says: ‘I phoned Paul Pritchard and he reassured me that his equipment was “top notch”.
‘What he didn’t tell me was that he had attached a new propeller that meant the boat accelerated more swiftly. I wouldn’t have been happy if I had known that.
‘And I certainly wouldn’t have been happy if I had known Emily would be given a life vest that would swamp her. The straps on the life vest were loose and it was those loose straps that were caught on the bottom of the hull.
‘He assured me the girls would be very safe and, though I still had misgivings, Emily so desperately wanted to go that I gave in.’
Emily was certainly not frightened of the water, explains her mother. ‘Over the years we’ve been on many boating and canoe trips – we once had a jet ski holiday in Turkey – so Emily was very com- fortable around the water and boats in general.’
The last time Deborah saw her daughter was at their home in Gloucester on the Friday morning of the day before she died. She says: ‘When I left home on Friday it was just a normal school morning. I said
“love you” as I left but I never for a second thought I would never see my precious girl again.’
That afternoon, Clive drove his daughter to Mr Pritchard’s house where the group was getting ready to leave. ‘Give your old dad a kiss,’ Clive said to Emily as they said their goodbyes.
The couple spoke to their daughter later in the evening. Emily texted her mother the next morning and at 9.07am texted her father saying: ‘LoL, I am here.’ Three minutes later, she sent the text containing the huge wave and the sleeping face.
Down in Devon, the Pritchards, Emily and Gemma Gadsen, another friend, headed into the harbour town of Brixham, where Paul Pritchard’s 15ft boat, a Fletcher 155, was moored. He had bought it on eBay for £1,800.
He told the girls to take life jackets from the back of his car. They clambered aboard, and headed out into the waters of the harbour.
The inquest in Torquay heard that the boat capsized within minutes of launching after it ploughed at close to top speed into a 6ft wave, instantly throwing all those aboard into the choppy waters.
A Marine Accident Investigation Branch report said that minutes after the boat left Brixham at 11.30am, ‘the driver of the speedboat opened the engine throttle to almost full speed’. The report said the speed and course of the boat in the seconds before the accident ‘contributed significantly’ to the tragedy. It also concluded that the weather, tidal and sea conditions had not been fully investigated before the party set out. The driver was not attached to the ‘kill cord’ – a device that stops the engine if the wearer is thrown overboard.
Holly and her father were hurled clear of the upturned hull and Holly managed to pull Gemma from under the boat. But petite Emily, who was wearing an extra-small wetsuit but an out-sized buoyancy aid, was trapped beneath the boat when it became tangled with cleats on the hull. Once freed, doctors at Torbay hospital tried desperately for 80 minutes to revive her, but she was pronounced dead from a heart attack and drowning.
That morning, Clive had taken his other two children rollerskating. Deborah, meanwhile, was at work when she received a call from Holly’s mother Alison telling her: ‘There’s been an accident.’
Deborah immediately called Clive who drove to Alison’s house.
In tears, Mrs Pritchard – who had stayed at home because she felt the boating trip would be too cold for her – told Clive his cherished daughter was dead.
Clive and Deborah dashed to Torbay hospital where they were asked if they wished to see Emily.
‘It was every parent’s dread,’ says Deborah, tears spilling down her cheeks. ‘She looked perfect, as though she was asleep. I cuddled her. But I knew she was gone.’
The following few days were agonising. Deborah says: ‘To get your 14-year-old daughter’s clothes – the last things she touched and wore – returned in a bag marked “deceased” is excruciating.
‘The anguish of holding your dead daughter’s body, so cold yet so perfect still, in the morgue is truly unbearable. I cut a small lock of her hair and I keep it with me always.’
Upstairs in the Gardner home, Emily’s room remains untouched, her iPod still sits on her dressing table and her blinds have been closed since her death.
Clive and Deborah were appalled when they discovered that the buoy- ancy aid their daughter had been wearing was an XL adult size, designed for a 45-50in chest, while she measured just 32-34in.
And only since the accident has Clive found out that there are no legal requirements for anyone, even children, to wear any sort of life preserver, let alone a correctly sized one. The couple are now determined that no one else should lose someone in a similar accident.
Recently they met their MP, who is helping them press for legislation – to be known as Emily’s Law – that makes both a speedboat driving qualification and a licence mandatory. The UK is one of the few EU countries that doesn’t insist on this. ‘It’s too late for Emily. Nothing can take away the pain of that,’ says Deborah. ‘But what we want is some meaningful memorial for our daughter and such a law would go some way towards that.’
Paul Pritchard declined to comment last night.
‘I cut a lock of her hair and keep it with me’