A jury at an inquest into the death of a toddler crushed in the shaft of a lift has recommended that no children under the age of 12 should be allowed unaccompanied into elevators.
They ruled that the death of three-year-old Solomon Soremekun was accidental and that he died from severe head injuries at Hynes Building on Augustine Street in the city.
His mother, Omolara Alibi, continues to be so traumatised by the tragic events on January 13, 2014, that she was unable to attend the inquest held last week at Galway County Hall, according to her solicitor Gerard O’Donnell.
The jury were told that the Nigerian national, whose four children were born in Ireland, had relocated from Dublin to Galway to be near the sea.
On the day of the fatality, she had taken a taxi with them to the Department of Social Protection to sort out paperwork associated by with the move.
Her daughter Princess, then aged seven, recalled that her mum was pushing a double buggy with her sisters Esther, two, and Zion, five months, and were about to leave the building to go for a walk after being told by a security guard they were making too much noise.
Solomon had run to the first-floor lift and the door shut behind him without pushing any buttons.
“Solomon was calling ‘mommy’,” Ms Alibi told gardai in her statement.
“There were people trying to calm me down but I ran downstairs and up again numerous times. I can remember at one point I could see blood around the elevator.”
Princess said she could hear him crying. “I think the lift was going up and down out of control because we could hear him on the first, second and third floor…I could hear his voice everywhere. Then it stopped, he stopped crying for mommy.”
Witnesses described seeing blood dripping onto the ground floor.
Emergency services were quick on the scene. Paul Moran of Galway Fire Brigade said after opening the lift door on the ground floor with a key, he could see a child dangling upside down, trapped between the lift door and the shaft wall.
“I could see the child was motionless and unresponsive.”
Paramedic John Cahill said he observed Solomon’s eyes were open and "staring vacantly straight down towards me as I looked up”.
Officers had to manually raise the elevator car in order to remove the boy, who had been trapped for an hour. Ambulance crew were unable to revive him and he was pronounced dead at the scene.
Leading the subsequent investigation, senior inspector with the Health and Safety Authority (HSA) Allan Costelloe told the inquest there was an inner door and an outer door on the lift installed in 1998.
“It appears he may have applied some pressure to the inner lift car door between the first and the ground floor and it opened and he moved out in the void space. The door closed and the lift continued to the ground floor and it caught him,” he explained.
“The gap is six inches. As the lift was going down his leg may have got caught and dragged him down.”
Galway West Coroner Dr Ciarán MacLoughlin said if the force of a small child was sufficient to open the inner door the lift was not safe.
Mr Costelloe said there were issues with the size of the gap and the level of maintenance, which by law must take place twice a year.
The gap was up to 10mm over what it should have been and an electric switch which triggered the opening of the inner door should only have worked when 150 newtons of pressure was applied in the event of an emergency – it was triggered with 40 newtons applied by the victim.
The HSA inspector said now there was a requirement to have a lock on the inner door to prevent it opening between floors. The watchdog was currently examining a further tightening of the regulations.
The Authority led a prosecution against the firm which fitted the elevator, Ennis Lifts Ltd, for not complying with European legislation regarding gap width. They pleaded guilty to breaching the Health and Safety Act at Galway Circuit Criminal Court in 2019 but escaped without a fine.
Consultant Pathologist Dr Stephanie Curran said the child sustained three very serious skull fractures which caused the brain to swell, injuries which were “instantaneously fatal”.
Dr MacLoughlin described the case as “very tragic”. He paid tribute to the emergency services who had responded, saying “even the most hardened, the most experienced of people dealing with fatalities”, would have found this death “very distressing”.
He said he often observed children in hotels, “going up and down lifts and it’s great fun – nobody thinks anything can go wrong”.
The jury returned a unanimous verdict of accidental death as a result of severe head injuries sustained in a crush.
At the suggestion of the coroner, they recommended that children under 12 be banned from lifts unless accompanied by an adult and that signs be erected alerting them about this.
Mr O’Donnell later revealed that his client, who was a nurse, had left Galway shortly after the tragedy, unable to return.
A civil case is expected to take place next year.
