‘She was happy, and then died in a stupid accident’
First doctor on scene recounts Diana’s fatal crash
Paris: French doctor Frederic Mailliez, the first physician on the scene of Princess Diana’s fatal car accident in Paris 20 years ago, says he gave first aid to the victims before knowing who he was treating. Mailliez was off-duty when he drove into the Alma road tunnel on August 31, 1997, a few seconds after the high-speed crash.
He wondered, “why there were so many journalists around the Mercedes as I was giving first aid.” It was only when he turned on his television the next morning that he learned the answer, Mailliez recounted on Tuesday in an interview.
Diana was pronounced dead a few hours after the crash that occurred while she and her boyfriend, Dodi Fayed, were being chauffeured by an intoxicated driver and pursued by photographers. A bodyguard was the car’s sole survivor.
On that summer night, Mailliez, an emergency doctor, was driving along the Seine river and approaching the tunnel when he saw a smoky accident scene ahead. He stopped and went to investigate. When he opened a door of the Mercedes, he saw four people, two of them in cardiac arrest. The other two, including Diana, were still alive. “They were reacting, but clearly had significant injuries,” the doctor said. He immediately called for emergency rescue services and went to work without medical equipment.
I checked with myself with other doctors, professors of medicine, and actually I couldn’t have done anything better than what I did — Frederic Mailliez, French doctor