I loved my work but there were also the sad and tragic moments as one would expect with such work that would help lead to my PTSD a condition that could lead to a life threatening situation as recently reported in the suicide of a police officer that you can read about HERE.

 

Tragedy

I suppose the saddest and most tragic event was when one winter we were called to the scene of children who had reportedly fallen into the ice-covered lake at nearby Gunnersbury Park on Sunday 17 February 1991. When I got there, I saw that the large lake was covered by thick ice and I was told that two children, a brother and his sister who lived nearby in Brentford, had been playing with their dog. The dog had run onto the ice chasing a stick that they had thrown for him to chase, and the dog had fallen through the ice into the freezing water. The boy who was aged about 10 years old, had gone onto the ice to try and save the dog and he had himself fallen through the ice into the freezing cold water. His sister had then gone onto the ice to try and save her brother and she too had fallen through the ice. All was quiet on the ice covered lake when we arrived and the place where they had all fallen through the ice was covered over by a fresh growth of ice. The children’s mother arrived shortly thereafter and it was late afternoon and the evening was descending, but we had to wait for the underwater rescue teams to arrive, although they were called the Rescue Team we all knew that that it was only two little lifeless bodies they would be finding, but I suppose we all hoped against hope that a miracle would happen and somehow they would be alive. I was tasked with taking care of the mother, which meant taking her account of what she knew and also taking the children’s details and of having to reassure her as best one could. Hours passed by as the divers went down time after time and emerged with nothing. The whole area was by then lit by bright arc-lights brought in, a number of ambulances stood by, a small crowd gathered as did some local reporters and there were many police officers, but we were all helpless to do anything but wait. Eventually with the strong arc-light illuminating a small circle in the ice that the underwater rescue team had broken in the ice, we saw the divers bubbles break the surface as the diver broke the surface and indicated to his crew a message, and then we saw him load something into the waiting wooden boat that they had found by the lakeside and dragged across the ice to where they were working in the hole in the ice. Then the diver went down and emerged again and the people in the boat helped lift something else he had bought up from the bottom of the lake into the boat. The boat was then dragged to the lakeside and the ambulance crew rushed to them, and then the two little bodies were put onto separate ambulance stretchers and brought to where their mother and I were standing by the two waiting ambulances whose back doors were open, and the little girl’s body was placed in one of the ambulances and the little boy’s body in the ambulance nearest to us. The mother was asked to identify her little girls body which she did with a tearful ‘Yes’ as the medical teams starting to work on her little body, trying to revive her. I went with the mother into the back of the second ambulance where the two-man ambulance crew had started to work on the little boy with the kiss of life, heart massage, injections and various tubes inserted into his breathing tract, but all to no avail. They worked for a long, long time but in the end had to accept defeat as their bodies had been underwater for 5 or 6 hours and there really had been no chance of bringing them back to life. At the station I wrote my report for the Coroner and I wasn’t called to give evidence at the subsequent Coroners Inquest to establish their cause of death, as the Coroner accepted my written evidence, as there was no dispute as to how they died. The images of those 2 lifeless sweet innocent little children remain with me to this day as I had three small children myself, and I still have flashbacks to what happend there at the lake that day as it is something one can never forget.

My previous reporting of Sudden Deaths were of an elderly man who lived alone found dead on his apartment’s floor with no suspicious circumstances and then a different type of sudden death where a young man had died while taking a hot bath and had been discovered because of the foul smell coming from his apartment weeks later. It wasn’t a pleasant scene and I won’t go into descriptive details of the scene but as many say, it’s a smell that you don’t easily forget! I never did find out the cause of his death but it was very rare to be called to give evidence at a Coroners Court as the Coroner invaribly accepted your written acount of the circumstances in discovering the deceased’s body.

 

The Funny Side

But police work also contained its funny and satisfying moments. One such a time was when I received a call of a woman screaming late one night outside a nearby doctor’s surgery. I drove around and around the area but couldn’t see or hear anything till I turned off my police car’s engine and got out of the car, and I then suddenly heard this rhythmic panting. I shone my torch under the star-well to find a couple making love, ok I thought at least she’s not in danger, but when I shone my torch on their faces I discovered that he was the one in danger! He was obviously drunk and was about 18 years old and he was obviously too drunk to realize who he was having sex with, because she looked to be in her mid 70’s or 80’s, if not older with a face (and other bits) as wrinkled as a prune and no wonder she had a huge grin on her face, she for sure couldn’t believe her luck! I took a lot of persuading from him not to arrest him and have him appear in court and appear in the local newspaper too on a granny bedding charge, and hopefully my ‘words of advice’ put him back on ‘the straight and narrow’, although that big smile still remained on granny’s face during it all!!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The above ‘crashed into a lampost’ incident that involved a well known member of Parliament reiterated to me the importance of not rushing to conclusions. In the early hours of the morning we came across a car that had crashed into a lampost, with the driver slumped over the steering wheel seemingly unconscious. The usual conclusion is ‘drink driving’, but as you can read in his letter, the cause was something very different!