Trevor Hicks, whose two teenage daughters were killed in the crush at Hillsborough on 15 April 1989, was told to “shut your fucking prattle” when he called on a senior police officer to help as the disaster was unfolding, a court has heard.
Hicks, who went to the FA Cup semi-final between Liverpool and Nottingham Forest with his then wife, Jenni, and their daughters Vicki, 15, and Sarah, 19, recalled the retort at the trial of the match commander, David Duckenfield, on a charge of manslaughter.
Hicks said that from his position in the side “pen” two of Hillsborough’s Leppings Lane terrace, he and others around him could see that the central pen three, where Sarah and Vicki were, had become too full and people were in severe distress.
The South Yorkshire police match control box was just above him, he said, and he called to two senior officers who came to stand on a platform outside it. The first, with gold braid on his cap, ignored him, Hicks told the court.
Asked by Christine Agnew QC, for the prosecution, about the second officer, he said he shouted to the officer to do something.
“He basically swore at me,” Hicks said. “He told me to ‘shut my fucking prattle’. Which I’ll never forget.”
Hicks said of the initial police response to the crush: “The whole reaction was one of containment rather than assistance.”
The Hicks family had also gone to Hillsborough the previous year, 1988, for the semi-final played between the same two clubs. On that occasion, he recalled, police manned two separate positions to check that people had tickets before they were allowed to proceed towards the Leppings Lane turnstiles.
In 1989, at the match commanded by Duckenfield, Hicks said there were no police checks for tickets on the approach to the turnstiles.
Jenni Hicks had a ticket to sit, while he and his daughters had tickets for the Leppings Lane terrace. He said once inside the girls “dumped” him to go to watch the match with friends.
“One of my last clear images of them was looking over their shoulders giving me a bit of a grin – in other words, they were giving their old man the slip,” Hicks told the jury.
Shortly after 3pm, Hicks saw Vicki being carried over a fence. He made his way down to the pitch and found his two daughters there, laid out next to each other.
He confirmed to Agnew that he and other men worked on giving the girls mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, and he then went in an ambulance with Vicki, believing Sarah would follow in another ambulance, although she did not.
At the hospital, Vicki was confirmed to have died. Her body was then taken back to the football ground and placed in the gymnasium. “Yes, something we didn’t agree with,” he said, “but that was done.”
After he and Jenni met up, it “took some time” to establish where Sarah was, before they found out she was at the gymnasium. There they were told she too had died.
He and Jenni then drove back from Sheffield to London. “I probably shouldn’t have driven home,” he said. “We were told the girls were the property of the coroner, we wouldn’t be able to see them or touch them or anything else. So we went home.”
Duckenfield has pleaded not guilty to causing the deaths by gross negligence manslaughter of 95 of those who died. The trial continues.
