Out of the shock and grief emerges the empathy and kindness of strangers
two children, her nieces. Yannis was delighted and he was jumping everywhere, playing around with his friends. It was a great evening.” Following the display, the group walked slowly back along the Promenade des Anglais towards their car. As they walked, the truck, driven by Bouhlel, came hurtling towards them. “My son was a bit further away with his friends,” recalled Mr Coviaux. “I just had time to grab my wife and pull her out of the way and to dive onto the ground. The lorry passed 10 centimetres from me. When I got back up, there was the crowd, and I was praying that Yannis was safe.” But when he looked down, he saw his son lying in a pool of blood. It reminded him of the lifeless body of the Syrian refugee Aylan, who drowned on the beach and whose image had shocked the world. “When I saw him on the floor, I immediately understood… It looked like Aylan,” said Mr Coviaux. He knew his son was dead but he scooped him up in his arms and ran “like a madman” for 600 yards towards the Lenval hospital. A car stopped and picked up the exhausted father and raced to the children’s hospital. Doctors tried frantically to revive Yannis, while Mr Coviaux returned to find out what happened to his friends. “Selfishly, I had only thought of my own family,” he said, shaking his head. His friend’s wife had died on the roadside while watching her children. He returned to the hospital, where doctors told him: “It’s over.” They gave him the boy wrapped in a white sheet, and he staggered out, with his wife screaming in anguish at his side. They walked back to the seafront and stood cradling the boy. “I stood like that for about half an hour until the emergency services came. I was holding my baby in my arms. My baby who died at the place where he went so often to paddle,” he said, before pointing to his chest: “There’s nothing left there. It’s as if my heart has been ripped out.”
Killian Mejri, a four-year-old boy, was also reported to have been killed. His father had been frantically scouring the streets of Nice since Thursday looking for his son amid the carnage.
Tahar Mejri, 39, said the boy’s mother had died in the attack but he had been unable to discover the fate of their son, whose scooter had been discarded next to her body. Speaking to French television, he said: “This is a disaster – I don’t know where he is. I found my wife – she’s dead, but I don’t know where my son is.
“He went off with his mum and I don’t know where he went. I’m still looking for him. I don’t know where he is. [I have looked in] hospitals in Nice,