Grenfell fire’s youngest victim was stillborn
BRITAIN: A husband and wife who escaped the Grenfell Tower blaze from the 21st floor have revealed how toxic fumes from the inferno killed their unborn son, just two months before he was due to be delivered.
Marcio and Andreia Gomes managed to escape from the highrise block, stepping over bodies as they climbed down pitch-black smoke-filled stairs with their two young daughters.
But their unborn baby, believed to be the youngest victim of the inferno, was delivered hours later as a stillborn, while his mother lay unconscious in an induced coma.
Marcio Gomes told The Sunday Telegraph the heartbreaking story of how just hours after the whole family escaped, he learnt that the poisonous fumes had claimed his baby son’s life.
‘‘The doctors came and said the baby’s heart had stopped and the priority is the mother,’’ said Gomes, 38, an IT manager at the schools inspectorate Ofsted, who has lived in Grenfell Tower with his family for the past 10 years.
‘‘My wife gave birth that night while she was in an induced coma, so she didn’t know at the time. At 11.03 in the evening my baby boy was born.
‘‘I was holding him, he looked peaceful, like a baby that was just sleeping. I wanted to be there with him but he had already died.’’
Doctors at King’s College Hospital explained to Gomes that the baby’s heart had stopped beating, and they needed to deliver him so that his wife did not contract an infection. ‘‘So he was born later that day and it was classed as a stillborn,’’ Gomes said.
He then faced the agonising task of explaining to his wife what had happened when she finally regained consciousness.
‘‘At first she didn’t want to talk about it and she said she didn’t want to see the baby. But I know my wife; the hospital were really good at keeping the baby there for us. The next day she was very happy to see the baby, she didn’t want the baby to go away.’’
He said that his family already knew that his wife was expecting a boy, and they had chosen the name Logan Isaac for him. Their two daughters - Megan, 10, and Luana, 12 - were excited about meeting their new baby brother. ‘‘The girls were already planning things like, ‘Logan can sleep with me in my bed’, and what they were going to do, so this has hit them quite hard as well,’’ he said.
Gomes said he was woken around 2am on the morning of the blaze by a neighbour banging on the door. He phoned the fire brigade repeatedly, begging them to help his family get out, explaining that his wife was seven months pregnant and asthmatic, and that his youngest daughter was also asthmatic. The instructions were always the same: to stay put.
It wasn’t until about 3.30am when he saw flames burst into his bedroom that he realised he had to get his family out no matter what. ‘‘I said to my family, ‘The fire is in the flat. We have to go and we have to go now and there is no turning back’,’’ he recalled.
‘‘I kept shouting from the back ‘keep going, keep going’.
‘‘What I didn’t realise is that there were already bodies on the stairwell we needed to step over. I said, ‘don’t run, I don’t want you to fall. Take each step as it comes’.’’
He told of the horrifying moment when someone who was still alive and lying in the stairwell grabbed his calf as he walked down.
‘‘And there was nothing I could do, I just said to my girls keep going. There was nothing I could have done.’’
When he was more than halfway down, he realised his eldest daughter was not in front of him, so he ran back up the stairs to find her lying unconscious on the floor, collapsed from smoke inhalation.
‘‘At one point, which was the worst moment for me, I heard my daughter say, ‘Dad, I can’t go any more’. That’s when I realised she was behind me. I told her to keep going, but my daughter said ‘I can’t, I can’t move’.’’
The family were rushed to hospital, where Andreia Gomes and Luana were put in induced comas and treated for smoke inhalation. Both have since been discharged, while Megan, who has asthma, remains in intensive care.
Gomes praised the response of the NHS, recalling the emergency room was full of doctors and nurses in casual clothes, who had turned up to work in the middle of the night. - Sunday Telegraph