Teenager ‘leaps to death from M-way bridge’ 15 years after surviving suicide plunge in mother’s arms
A TEENAGER who miraculously survived a 100ft fall in the arms of her mother as a toddler is believed to have jumped to her death 15 years later.
Yazmina Howard was just three when her mother, Maxine Carr, killed herself by leaping off their seventh-storey balcony to escape an abusive partner.
The little girl was found alive – crying and shivering – at the bottom of the apartment block, suffering skull damage, a broken arm, rib and jaw.
But on Monday evening, Miss Howard, an 18-year-old college student, is understood to have tragically taken her life after jumping from a motorway bridge six miles from her home.
Yesterday, her devastated grandparents, who adopted her, paid tribute to their ‘beautiful girl, inside and out, who would never hurt anyone’.
They told how she had battled through the childhood trauma her whole life, and had been talked down from jumping off another bridge just a week earlier.
Grandmother Janet Howard, 68, said she thought Miss Howard was buying a pizza with her friend and had received a text less than an hour before her death reassuring her she was OK.
Mrs Howard said: ‘That was the last I heard. Whatever happened from then, we’ll never know – we don’t know what has driven her to this at all.’
On August 1, 2003, Miss Carr, 33, jumped from the balcony of her home in Maidstone, Kent.
Neighbours said they heard a ‘very loud thud’ followed by the sound of a child crying, which grew louder and louder until it was into ‘blood-curdling’. Miss Carr’s death The heard inquest how she feared that her ex-partner Ivan Delgardo planned to kidnap her daughter and take her to live in his native Spain. Coroner Roger Sykes said: ‘All of you have suffered terribly from what happened and not least, of course, Yazmina. I hope that time will prove to be a healer to some degree as far as she is concerned.’
Fifteen years later, Miss Howard was found dead below a motorway bridge on the M20 at Larkfield in Kent at 10pm on Monday. Kent Police said her death was not being treated as suspicious. Yesterday, her grandmother said: ‘She was an emotional person, which may have been connected to the trauma she experienced when we lost her mum, but she seemed to battle through it all.
‘She was strong. She’d call us Nan and Grandad but sometimes “Mum” would slip out – she was more like a daughter than a granddaughter to us.
‘ Yazmina didn’t smoke, she didn’t go out clubbing.’
She added: ‘Even when she drank wine, she’d make sure it was vegan because she loved animals and cared about the environment. That’s the kind of girl Yazmina was.’ Miss Howard’s grandfather, Michael Howard, 70, said his granddaughter had been talked down from jumping off a bridge by her boyfriend just a week before. Howard Following was the seen incident, by the NHS Miss mental health unit known as Priority House based at Maidstone Hospital, where she was put under a ‘crisis team’, he said. But Mr Howard said the family received no further help, adding: ‘We expected someone to give us a call and say, “come here and we can give you some guidance in some way”. What I can’t understand is, they take them into this Priority House, how do they evaluate someone to say that they can go? It seems the system has really let her down.’ He added: ‘ She studied art, maths and multimedia but didn’t know whether she wanted to carry on with the course. ‘She’d tell us, “I’ll have to start all over again or get a terrible job with terrible money”. There’s more and more children getting like this and they rarely get the help and support they need. It’s left a big void in our life.’
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‘The system has let her down’