Emotion overwhelmed the Grenfell Tower inquiry when about 20 survivors walked out in distress and a woman collapsed in an apparent panic attack during a video presentation about the deaths of six members of the same family.
Proceedings were suspended for 30 minutes on Tuesday after survivors in the audience broke down at the sight of footage of the tower on fire and people trapped behind windows. The footage was still running as people rushed out of the room before it was eventually stopped. Paramedics were called to help and the second counsel to the inquiry, Bernie Richmond QC, apologised for failing to warn people about what was coming, as he had promised he would.
“For that I am truly sorry,” he said. Warnings about distressing material in all the remaining tributes will be printed and distributed daily from now on, he said. The incident highlighted just how raw emotions are less than a year since the disaster and the challenge facing the inquiry team and the survivors.
It came towards the end of an already intense day’s evidence. Hisam Choucair, whose mother, sister, brother-in-law and three nieces all died on the 22nd floor, had told how he ran to the fire and “had to stand there ... watching them all burn to death”. He said the fire was not a tragedy but an “atrocity” caused by the segregation of rich and poor.
“I think they call it a post code lottery,” he said and described how three generations of his family had died. They were his mother, Sirria Choucair, 60, a hospital caterer who lived on the 22nd floor in a flat neighbouring his sister, Nadia, 33, a nursery teacher, her husband Bassem, 40, a supervisor at Marks and Spencer, and their three daughters, Mierna, 13, Fatima, 11, and Zaynab, three.
“I have not been able to grieve,” he said. “In one night I lost half my family. It will not be until it all stops that you will see the damage. It has already ruined many lives. This inferno has split up families and smashed up their lives. None of the counselling I receive can ever repair what has been done. I have to live with my family ripped apart for the rest of my life.”
His sister, Sawson, added: “What we do not want is excuses. I can’t let people get away with such an atrocity.”
The emotional intensity of the day’s evidence only increased when Karim Mussily, the nephew of Hesham Rahman, 57, who died on the 23rd floor, defied a warning from Richmond that his speech was veering towards evidence that should be taken later in the inquiry. He replied: “We have been censored enough.” Someone in the audience shouted “Go on!”.
He recounted walking up the narrow escape staircase to his uncle’s flat after the fire to see where he perished, and seeing the smudged fingerprints of adults and children on the walls and telling his late uncle that he was “sorry you were left alone to die in this death trap”.
“When you go home tonight hug your loved ones,” he said. “Until those in power listen and make changes to a system that fails, God only knows how many homes are safe in our country. We are here because the system failed. The system was allowed to kill Hesham and 71 others.”
“We are having an inquiry to find out what most of us already know,” he said. “We are here because nobody listened and those in authority were convinced they knew better. You can’t sweep this under the carpet ... Materials that are clearly dangerous to us are still there on buildings up and down the country ... Not good enough is not the word. This is how our families are being remembered. They are being remembered by a culture of neglect.”
He remarked that it was “disrespectful” that so few people in power seemed to have attended so far. He received a standing ovation.
The morning session remembered the last people to die, a Spanish-born health worker, an Egyptian-born mother of two and her infant daughters, and a 45-year old British woman who worked at Holland Park Opera.
Miriam Lamprell, the mother of Deborah Lamprell, 45, who lived on the 19th floor, described her daughter’s happy childhood, picking blackberries with her father, Reg, She said she felt “terrible” that she urged her to get a council flat because she thought it would be safer than a private bedsit.
“I am bereft without her,” she said in a statement read out on her behalf.
She described how on the night she died, her daughter texted her to say: “I have got in Mum, all’s well, good night, God bless.”
“I went to bed and I got up in the morning and I didn’t have a daughter,” she said. “I am an old woman with nothing else left and maybe it took losing Debbie to realise we weren’t normal. Debbie was an extraordinary person and I was completely blessed to have her as my daughter.”
Maria del Pilar Burton, 74, known as Pily, knew Deborah Lamprell and lived on the same floor.
In a 25-minute tribute that triggered tears across the hall, her widower, Nicholas Burton, told how she had come from Galicia in Spain as a child with her affluent family and that he had met her at a Spanish discotheque in Carnaby Street in the 80s. It was the start of a 34-year relationship. He was much younger than her – younger even than her son – but he moved in, “sock by sock”, and described her and her family’s love of Galician music, her love of reggae and how music united people in the tower, wherever they were from.
Grenfell was “a community, layer upon layer of people”, he said. “[They were] people who came into the country to help build things here. Pily was diagnosed with dementia in 2015. On the night of the fire the couple had fallen asleep on the sofa of their 19th floor after watching a DVD.
“I woke to discover the building was on fire,” he said. “It was impossible to carry my wife down about 40 flights of stairs so we had to wait to be rescued. She had to be carried out by four firefighters. Most of her clothes had to be cut off. I tried to get to her. I was convinced my wife was dead. But miraculously, she survived and was rushed to hospital.”
When he found her at the Royal Free hospital, she was “in a terrible state”, he said.
“How do you explain to a person in that condition that your house was gone, your dog had gone, your good friends and neighbours may have passed and that her parents ashes that we kept in the flat had gone. It was just too much.”
She suffered a brain haemorrhage that left her on life support and she died on 29 January 2018.
Rasha Ibrahim, the sister of Rania Ibrahim, who lived on the 23rd floor with her daughters Fethia, five, and Hania, three, travelled from Egypt to contribute.
“I miss hearing her voice,” she said of her sister who came to the UK in 2009. “She was happiness walking on earth. No one would sit with Rania and not smile. Now that I have lost that I feel … broken.”
“It is very difficult for me to think or talk about what happened next,” she told those gathered at the inquiry, through an interpreter. “To this day the questions remain in my mind and plague me about what happened. It is very important for me to take part in this process of questioning to find out the truth.”
• This article was amended on 23 May 2018. Maria del Pilar Burton lived on the same floor as Debbie Lamprell, not three floors apart. The initial error arose because the numbering of the floors was changed after refurbishment. Also, Deborah Lamprell lived on the 19th floor, not the 16th. This has been corrected.
