‘My daughter was dying and I had to say goodbye over the phone’
Mother of girl killed by allergic reaction to Pret baguette tells how flight delay denied her farewell
THE mother of a teenager killed after she suffered an allergic reaction to sesame seeds in a Pret A Manger baguette was robbed of spending a final few hours with her daughter because of a six-hour flight delay.
Stuck at Stansted Airport after being urged by her husband to rush to Nice, where her daughter had fallen desperately ill, all Tanya Ednan-Laperouse could do was whisper to Natasha over the phone as she lay dying.
Natasha, 15, from Fulham, west London, was on board a British Airways flight, heading for a four-day break in Cote d’Azur with her father Nadim when she went into anaphylactic shock and suffered a cardiac arrest.
When the plane landed in Nice, Mr Ednan-Laperouse rang his wife to urge her to get the first flight out.
“I was pottering around at home when the phone rang at 9.30am,” said Mrs Ednan-Laperouse. “Nad was crying and he said, ‘Tanya, you’ve got to come here. Natasha’s not well and something terrible has happened. You’ve got to come.’
“He said it was an allergic reaction, she’d had CPR and I had to drop everything and come now.”
Although it was the first weekend of the school holidays and just a few days after the terror attack in Nice, in which a 19ton truck ploughed into Bastille Day crowds, killing 86, Mrs Ednan-Laperouse found a flight from Stansted leaving at 6pm.
Despite being told the flight was full when she got to the airport, check-in staff managed to find her a seat.
But then it was announced the flight was being delayed by six hours. All Mrs Ednan-Laperouse could do was huddle in a quiet corner of the departure lounge and listen to the increasingly desperate updates from her husband. In her first interview since her daughter’s death she said: “When I got to the airport, the lady at the check in desk said, I’m sorry, the flight’s full. “I started crying. I said, ‘You’ve got to get me to France, my daughter’s dying.’ Somehow, she got me on. I was sobbing the whole time, in a bubble and not aware of anything beyond it. “I was holding it together, trying not to fall apart. Then, we were told there was a delay for six hours. We wouldn’t leave till midnight. I was constantly crying. There were people with children and I didn’t want to scare them. I tried to move away from people.” Mrs Ednan-Laperouse explained: “I was getting constant updates from Nad, which kept getting worse. The paramedics meeting the plane had brought a defibrillator, which didn’t work, and had to grab another from the airport. Her heart would restart, only to stop again. Her ribs were broken from the effort, and the paramedics themselves were exhausted. They couldn’t get a tube down her throat, it was so swollen.” On landing, her daughter had been taken to Nice’s Hospital Louis Pasteur 2, where doctors worked in vain to save her. “Nad was calling regularly to say it was really bad, that she wasn’t expected to make it,” said Mrs Ednan-Laperouse. “Then I got the call from Nad to say she was going to die within the next two minutes and I had to say goodbye to her. And I did. I said, ‘Tashi, I love you so much, darling. I’ll be with you soon.’
“The drugs she was given to keep her heart pumping were leaving her system. She had died some time before hand and this was it all shutting down.
“I had to just sit and wait. I couldn’t howl or scream or cry because I was surrounded by people. I had to really hold it together.”
Eventually Mrs Ednan-Laperouse, by now grieving the loss of her daughter, boarded the plane alongside the other passengers, who were oblivious to the ordeal she was going through.
“No one knew,” she said. “I had my head down, and tears were falling the whole time. It’s hard to explain, but it was on the flight I felt this overwhelming sense of sympathy for Nad. That he needed my love and understanding. I knew how much he loved her.” Nata- sha’s parents have now called for a change in the law, which permits food made on or near the premises to be exempt from allergy labelling.
“We now know she didn’t die on our watch – she died on Pret’s watch, and all thanks to the absence of two little words on the packaging of her sandwich,” said Mrs Ednan-Laperouse. “If the label had listed sesame seeds, Natasha wouldn’t have touched it and she’d still be alive.”
For Mr and Mrs Ednan-Laperouse life stopped when Natasha died, but now they have thrown into themselves into campaigning to make sure no other parents suffer the way they have.
“Society as a whole has to take allergies more seriously. People need to be aware that they can be deadly. Foods can kill certain people, even if you see them as safe. Everything should be labelled wherever possible. Pret should not be excluded. I know this is a big deal to do that. But it absolutely has to be done.”
‘I had to just sit and wait. I couldn’t howl or scream or cry because I was surrounded by people. I had to really hold it together’