IF MY BABY JESS IS IN THERE, HOW CAN I LIVE?
She’s the missing 12 year old girl who has come to symbolise the agony of the tower block tragedy. Here the mother she phoned screaming ‘Come and get me!’ – and who has searched for her ever since – tells MoS:
SMILING shyly at the camera, corkscrew curls dangling, she has become the face of the Grenfell Tower inferno – the girl who screamed ‘Mummy, come and get me!’ in a desperate final phone call.
On walls, fences, in shop windows, strewn across the streets of North Kensington, the happy image of a girl just a few weeks short of her 13th birthday is everywhere.
But Jessica Urbano herself is nowhere to be found.
Her distraught mother Adriana Ramirez has tirelessly searched the capital to find her daughter.
From street to street, from hospital to hospital, Adriana has pinned up posters, appealed for information, and has prioritised hope above the grief which threatens now to overwhelm her as the hours tick by with no further news. Because that hope is starting to fade. Behind a pair of oversized pink sunglasses, the tears are never far away.
Jessica was last heard screaming for her mother, trapped in a stairwell below the family’s 20th-floor flat as the inferno seized the throat of Grenfell Tower.
Last night, Colombian-born Adriana, 38, gave her first account of the horror that has overwhelmed her life, telling The Mail on Sunday: ‘I had just an hour’s sleep last night, and the night before. But I can’t sleep, I can’t stop thinking about Jessica and where she is.
‘What if she wakes up alone? She’s a strong girl but I can’t bear that thought. She needs her mummy to be with her. I need to be with her.
‘I’m looking at that building – is my baby in there? What if she is?
‘What if she is dead? If she is, I can’t live. How can I live? It’s like something has been ripped from my body. I feel so guilty that I wasn’t in – but I had to work.’
And work she did, one of the vast army of cleaners, most of them foreign born, who labour through the night in half-lit offices to keep the capital running by day. When Adriana left her two-bedroom flat for her regular overnight shift on Tuesday evening, she could never have imagined it might be the last time she saw her daughter alive.
The flat itself was a symbol of hard work and determination, bought by Adriana following nearly 20 years of saving on a meagre wage in order to provide for her children, including Jessica’s older sister Melani, 20, a Coventry University student.
She says: ‘I moved [to Grenfell Tower] a year ago from East London. I was happy here, I had made friends. I had just recently moved Jessica to a new school.
‘She is such a kind, happy, clever girl and so strong.’
Adriana says Jessica was only briefly alone on that fateful night. Melani had gone out with her boyfriend, and it is understood that Jessica’s father – separated from Adriana – had returned to his flat on the third floor shortly after midnight. Within an hour, the deadly blaze broke out on the fourth floor, hundreds of feet below her. The first call to the emergency services was recorded at 12.54am.
Working just half a mile away, Adriana was alerted to news of the blaze by her boss, and immediately ran to the scene. It was while she was hurrying back that she received the devastating call from Jessica on an unfamiliar number.
‘Jessica told me she was on the stairs. She was shouting: “Mummy! Mummy! Come and get me!” I told her: “Just get down the stairs, to the bottom of the building, and I will find you!” Then the line cut out.’
It was 1.29am – a mere 35 minutes since the start of the fire. According to Adriana, Jessica had been on her own for just half an hour, and had left the flat apparently after being woken by the blaze.
Now, she stood in the smokechoked stairwell with other panicked residents trying to flee.
In the pandemonium, she had borrowed a mobile from neighbours Biruk and Brkite Haftom,
‘She needs her mummy to be with her’
who lived on the 18th floor. It would be the last time Adriana spoke to her daughter.
By the time she arrived at the tower, a safety cordon was in place and firefighters had to physically stop her from entering the building. She stands just a little over 5ft tall, but was determined to get up the stairs. ‘I saw the fire in front of me. I needed to get in. I tried to run in and shouted at the firemen, “F ****** let me in!” But they wouldn’t.
‘I saw people coming out in blankets. I needed to get to my baby.’
Her only hope was that Jessica had not made a potentially fatal decision to return to the flat.
She continues: ‘I hoped she kept walking down the stairs and didn’t go back into the flat. If she kept walking down the stairs, she might have got out.’
Jessica’s father, Romero Urbano, had also taken a frantic call from Jessica. He had been in a flat on the third floor, and had tried to reach his daughter, but he was beaten back by the intense smoke and flames and had made the agonising decision to escape the building to save his own life. Powerless, Adriana and Romero could only look on as the blaze took hold.
By dawn on Wednesday, with no sign of Jessica, they were spurred into action in the hope that she may have been taken to hospital. Determined to be positive despite the tragedy of the events unfolding around her, Adriana began to search herself. A friend offered to drive her around the five central London hospitals who were treating victims of the disaster.
That morning, director Noel Clarke, who shot the movie Kidulthood in the area, tweeted a picture of Jessica, writing: ‘Friends’ niece Jessica Urbano is missing.’ It quickly went viral.
But at the hospitals, there was still no sign of Jessica.
‘I would go into the A&E departments and show them Jessica’s picture and give a description, but they would say they haven’t heard her name. It was horrible.’
Frustration hampered Adriana’s efforts, as the hospitals themselves still had no information on the identities of the 74 patients they were treating. But despite having more thorough patient lists on Thursday, they were still no more helpful.
‘They’d quickly check the lists, but that’s all,’ she says. ‘They didn’t let me up to the wards, to see physically, with my own eyes, if Jessica was there. Because she might be there, lying unconscious.’
Her hopes were raised by rumours that a girl resembling Jessica was seen with paramedics in the early hours of Wednesday. But Adriana admits: ‘I don’t know where that came from.’ By Thursday, every street within a mile of Grenfell Tower was covered with posters of Jessica. But it still wasn’t enough for Adriana. Armed with hundreds more sheets, and with one strapped to her back, she trudged under the huge concrete Westway flyover, handing posters to plumbers’ merchants and leafleting every car.
At a Ladbroke Grove bus stop already bearing one poster of her daughter, she made sure there were three – so Jessica could be seen from every direction. Amid the white stucco townhouses of Portobello Road, she made sure Jessica’s face shone out from upmarket restaurants and gastropubs.
But by Thursday evening, with still no word on Jessica, the effort of her tireless search had begun to take its toll. She now believes there is ‘no point’ in going round the hospitals any more. Defeat is not something Adriana takes lightly. She has found it hard to accept charity, despite losing almost everything. Instead, she is living at her nephew’s flat a stone’s throw from Grenfell Tower, making do with a pair of borrowed flip flops and jeans. An impromptu vigil in Bramley Road, near Latimer Road Tube, organised by Adriana’s sister-in-law, Sandra Ruiz, saw crowds gathering to pay their respects to the missing.
Mrs Ruiz told the crowd: ‘It’s about love and unity. There are too many people affected by this.’ Leading them in the Lord’s Prayer, she added: ‘Keep positive, keep looking for Jessica, keep praying!’
On Friday, Adriana and Romero met a police family liaison officer, assigned to help counsel them and take on the task of contacting hospitals. It is of little comfort.
There is still hope, but yesterday Adriana was at home, knowing there is little more that can be done.
‘I think I have to prepare myself for the worst now,’ she says.
‘I should be the one who is dead. I wish it was me. I wish I could have been in the tower, and not her.’
‘I wish I had been in the tower, and not her’