‘Save my baby,’ father says before dying
Father and four relatives die after car slides into Irish lake. Infant girl is all mom has left
Davitt Walsh will never forget the screams.
He was treading water outside the sinking vehicle, his mind full of the terrified yells of the people trapped inside. In one arm, he clutched the tiny infant who had just been passed through a broken window by her father. With the other, he reached for the hand of the girl’s 12-year-old brother.
The sea was seeping in fast. The car was slipping away.
“The father just looked at me and said, ‘Save my baby,’ ” Walsh recalled in an interview with Raidio Teilifis Eireann (RTE), the public broadcaster in Ireland.
“I couldn’t do anything else. The car went down. The whole lot went down. It was so fast.”
In that instant Sunday, the baby girl’s father, brothers, aunt and grandmother were lost to the murky depths of Ireland’s “Lake of Shadows,” Lough Swilly in County Donegal. And Walsh did the only thing left to do: He held the infant, 4-monthold Rioghnach-Ann, above his head and swam her back to shore.
The baby’s five family members — her father, Sean McGrotty, 49; brothers Mark, 12, and Evan, 8; aunt Jodie Lee Daniels, 14; and grandmother Ruth Daniels, 59 — were buried near their home in Derry, Northern Ireland, on Thursday.
All Rioghnach-Ann has left is her mother, Louise McGrotty, who was at a family function in England when the accident happened. And all Louise has left is her.
“Words cannot describe what they are going through,” the family’s priest, Father Paddy O’Kane, told the Irish Independent. “Louise said to me, ‘I have lost everyone, except little Rioghnach-Ann’. She said ‘Rioghnach-Ann is my reason to go on.’ ”
The accident that robbed the girl and her mother of their family and left their community reeling happened just five days ago, on a pictur- esque pier overlooking Lough Swilly. The long, narrow inlet, carved by glaciers and brimming with deep-blue sea water, has a history of shipwrecks and accidents. And the nearby town of Buncrana is no stranger to tragedy — a 2010 car accident that killed eight people was the worst in Ireland’s history. But the seaside spot is also famously beautiful, even inspirationally so. The slave trader-turned-theologian Jon Newton penned “Amazing Grace” after taking shelter in the lough during a violent storm.
Sean McGrotty’s brother, Tommy, told the Irish Independent that Sean probably decided to take the family to Buncrana pier to watch the sunset after they all went out to dinner in town.
“It was just a day out, it was just a nice day’s outing, as anybody does on a Sunday,” Tommy McGrotty said.
But the long slipway to the ocean where they parked their Jeep was streaked with algae and notoriously slick. According to the BBC, at least two other cars have been lost there in the past year.
Francis Crawford, who lives in Bun- crana, was standing on the pier enjoying the same sunset when he saw the Jeep start to “wobble about.”
Crawford hastily made a call for help, then watched in horror as the car slid down the slipway into the sea. The minutes ticked by forebodingly.
The first people to arrive were not rescue workers, but Walsh, 29, and his girlfriend, Stephanie Knox.
“Can you swim?” Crawford asked, frantic. “Please, please, could you?”
Walsh could hear the family’s awful screams for help from the car, which was about 20 metres from the shoreline and already halfway submerged. Before he was aware what he was doing, he’d stripped off his clothes down to his boxers and was running down the algae-streaked spillway toward them.
“Just as I got out there the father had the window half ajar, and he started hitting it with his elbow to break it,” Walsh told RTE. “I started shouting, ‘Please everyone has to get out of the car — the car is going to go down, everyone has to get out.’ ”
They were trying. But the Jeep’s waterlogged electronics had jammed, and the doors wouldn’t unlock.
Finally, Sean McGrotty managed to shatter the glass of his driver’s-side window. He heaved himself partway through it and passed Walsh a small bundle. “Take the baby,” he said. “I took the baby, and I said, ‘Someone else,’ ” Walsh recalled. “I wanted to save more people.”
He grasped the arm of 12-year-old Mark and pulled. But the Jeep was starting to sink, dragging the boy and the rest of his family from Walsh’s grip. Sean McGrotty, who was still halfway through the broken window, looked at Walsh and repeated himself one last time. “Save my baby,” he urged. “And he stayed and went back in with his family and the car just disappeared,” Walsh told RTE.
Knox, still on the pier, watched as her boyfriend swam around the sinking vehicle.
“It was very traumatic and difficult to stand on the pier and to watch what was unfolding in front of me,” she told Belfast Live. She dreaded what would happen to the people trapped inside the car. She dreaded what would happen to Walsh if he tried to dive down after them.
“I shouted at him, ‘Davitt come back, Davitt come back,’ ” she recalled. “I could see he was struggling and that he was tiring fast as he held the baby really high up in the air.”
Everything was noise and chaos and desperation. Screams rent the spring evening — Crawford’s cries for help, Knox’s pleading for her boyfriend, the family’s agonized wails as the water in the car crept higher.
In the instant before the worst came to pass, there was silence.
“No noise, no screams, you could hear a pin drop on the pier,” she said. And then the car was gone. Walsh, the baby above his head, slowly swam toward the shore. Knox picked her way down the spillway to meet him, walking into the water up to her waist. He handed the infant to her, then collapsed on the algae-slick concrete.
Meanwhile, Knox crawled up the spillway with Rioghnach-Ann in her arms. The 4-month-old was utterly silent. Knox, who is a cardiographer at a hospital in nearby Derry, feared that the infant might be dead. She readied herself to perform CPR. Finally she heard a tiny sputter. “It was the smallest, faintest cough I have ever heard and I will never forget it,” Knox said. “That was the moment when I realized Davitt had done so well.”
Soon after, a swarm of emergency responders arrived at the scene. The baby, stripped of her wet clothes and wrapped in Knox’s coat, was handed to a paramedic and rushed to a local hospital. Meanwhile, divers, coast guard boats and helicopters converged on the spot where the car had gone down just moments before.
Crawford watched as divers pulled bodies from the water and began to administer mouth to mouth. It had been just 10 minutes since he made his initial call, and less than that since the car vanished from sight.
“But there was no hope,” he told the Belfast Telegraph. He shook his head. “Nothing was going to happen. Too long had passed.”