Let me die too so I can look after my girl
Youngest Arena victim’s mum in tearful tribute to Saffie, eight
THE mum of the Manchester Arena atrocity’s youngest victim told tearfully yesterday of how she wanted to die to be with her after hearing she was gone.
Saffie-Rose Roussos, eight, was killed in terrorist Salman Abedi’s suicide blast in May 2017, while mother Lisa was seriously injured.
During the public inquiry into the horror yesterday, she and husband Andrew spoke of their loss.
Tearful Lisa said: “The day I woke up from the coma, Andrew held my hand and looked up at me. I instantly knew. ‘ Saffie has gone, hasn’t she?’ and he replied, ‘ Yes’.
“I cried and begged him to let me die too. ‘I can look after her,’ I cried. I did die that day. Inside, I am dead.
“When my children are grown and have their own families, and I have fulfilled my role as mother, I will be with my little Saffie again.”
Lisa said Saffie’s school in Tarleton, Lancs, asked for three words to describe her for a plaque.
She said: “How do you find three words to describe somebody like Saffie? It’s impossible. We settled for beautiful, captivating and kind.”
FAILURES
Andrew said lessons “should have been learned” after 7/7 and 9/11. And he told inquiry chairman Sir John Saunders: “What we are now going through, the failures we are all listening to and excuses, needs to stop. Enough is enough, sir.” He added: “Saffie’s life is not a practice exercise for the security services or the emergency services.” Charlotte Hodgson, the mother of victim Olivia Campbell-Hardy, 15, from Bury, Greater Manchester, said her daughter “didn’t walk into a room, she made an entrance”. She said: “The door would fling open, she would shout ‘ Bonjour!” She said her daughter “hated” odd numbers and would turn the TV volume to a 10 if it was on 11. And she added: “When she died she was given a body number, she was number five. She would have hated that, being an odd number. “Olivia is not a number. To the world she is one of the 22 angels. Not to me, she is Ollie. She will never just be a number.” The inquiry also heard how the death of d i n ner lady Wendy Fawell, 50, “bewildered” kids at her primary in Leeds, West Yorks. The mum of two’s family added: “The loss is indescribable. We have never felt such grief.”
The inquiry continues.