Drayton Manor death: Woman tried to climb barrier to save 'panicked' child
Theresa Atkinson says she saw Evha Jannath and other students standing up and reaching into the water on the ride.
Tuesday 5 November 2019 22:46, UK
A woman has told how she tried to climb a barrier in an attempt to rescue a young girl who fell from a river rapids ride at Drayton Manor theme park.
Evha Jannath, 11, was "propelled" from a six-seater dinghy on the Splash Canyon ride in May 2017 while on a school trip.
An inquest heard Evha and other students on the boat had been standing up and "reaching into the water" when it hit a barrier and sent the 11-year-old head first into the water.
Safety measures on the ride had been discussed three weeks before the girl drowned, the inquest heard.
Eyewitness Theresa Atkinson said she was at the ride's viewing platform waiting for her husband's vessel to come into view when she spotted the students.
She described seeing the girls "leaning over and trying to scoop water at each other".
Ms Atkinson, who was with her young son in his pushchair, recalled looking at her son and thinking, "If you do something stupid like that when you're older, you're getting a smack".
However, she said she was not initially concerned for the girls' safety.
As the students' boat passed her, Ms Atkinson said that in the "blink of an eye" they began screaming.
"They were right in front of me and I could hear screaming but couldn't quite work out what they were saying.
"As they approached the end of the ride there's a ramp you go up - the boats go up - and two spinning things move the ramp," she said.
"I could hear them screaming, 'She's fallen in' and I thought to myself 'Who has fallen in?'
"I turned and I looked to the water and realised there was someone that had fallen in and that's when I realised, I could see her.
"She was actually holding on to that bit of wood there. A barrier."
Ms Atkinson said she shouted to the girl, who was "panicking", to stay where she was.
She continued: "She seemed to let go and then she was still trying to hold on and was literally right in front of me.
"I tried to climb over the fencing to get to her, then (I was) panicking that I couldn't get my foot over the fencing.
"I had my son in a pushchair, I didn't want to leave him. I made a decision to shout at her to stay still.
"I was scared in case she got in the mechanism of the ramp."
Ms Atkinson said she did not want Evha, who was wearing a long black dress, to get caught in the ride's mechanism, so decided to rush to the photo booth.
She said it took "three to four minutes" to get to the booth, where she "calmly" told a member of staff that a girl had fallen into the water.
The mother said that when she returned to the viewing platform, the girl was not there so she assumed she had been pulled out of the water.
Hayley Dyson, the member of staff who spoke to Ms Atkinson, said she rang the ride operators to stop the ride.
Her colleagues said they were "checking the cameras and CCTV to see what's going on" and a few minutes later she saw other staff heading to the ride.
The ride operator that day, Samuel Read, had been in the control room and said that the park's procedure was to press an emergency stop button if staff witnessed a person falling into the water.
But he said that if staff did not witness it and had only received reports, the person in the control room would search the ride CCTV first.
Mr Read, who had worked at the park for 10 years and was trained on the attraction, said it might take "a minute or two" to search the nine CCTV cameras during a potential incident.
He also said the cameras did not cover the entire ride.
He did not turn off the water pumps that drive the boats until another staff member told him to. He turned them off 10 minutes after the girl's fall was first reported to him.
It also emerged that during a meeting to discuss safety measures three weeks before the incident, staff members raised issues with the CCTV screens being difficult to see and the legibility of safety signs in the boats telling customers to stay in their seats.
The inquest earlier heard that some 11 minutes after staff were alerted to Evha entering the water, she was spotted face down in a 12ft deep area of water.
Another six minutes later, she was pulled out but was described as "lifeless".