Summer Grant: Instructions for bouncy castle 'destroyed in fire' before death
Seven-year-old Summer Grant was killed when the inflatable castle blew away with her inside it during an Easter fair in Essex.
Monday 30 April 2018 15:32, UK
The operating instructions for a bouncy castle were destroyed in a fire a year before it blew away, killing a child, a court has heard.
Summer Grant was carried away inside the inflatable at an Easter fair in Harlow, Essex, on 26 March, 2016.
The seven-year-old, from Norwich, had been at the fair with her family.
She died soon after she was rescued.
Prosecutors have told Chelmsford Crown Court that the bouncy castle was not "adequately anchored" to the ground and that those in charge failed to monitor weather conditions to make sure it was safe.
Fairground worker William Thurston, 29, and his wife Shelby Thurston, 26, both deny manslaughter by gross negligence and a health and safety offence following the incident.
Mrs Thurston, from Wilburton, near Ely, Cambridgeshire, said the instructions for operating the castle had been destroyed in an arson attack on a caravan in 2015, the year after her father Billy Searle had bought it.
The caravan had been at a show in Jersey in the Channel Islands at the time.
She told the court: "Someone didn't like the fairground being on that event.
"Some youths set alight a gas bottle.
"They had turned it on full then lit a rag to the gas bottle and rolled it under the caravan that my parents and sisters were staying in.
"If my mum hadn't woken up and seen the flames who knows what would have happened?
"It was pushed under where my sister was sleeping and where a lot of the paperwork was kept."
When the castle was purchased, Mr Searle and Mrs Thurston had undergone a day of training but after the arson attack, only a certificate of safety could be salvaged.
Mrs Thurston, who said her family had worked in the fairground industry for "generations", told police that the bouncy castle was hers but said in court that it was her father's.
She said: "I was operating the dome without my father present and after the incident that happened, when I was arrested it began to dawn on me that I may get my father into trouble.
"I was in custody for a long time, 20 hours maybe, so I told the police that he had gifted it to me so I would be the person taking immediate responsibility.
"I thought that he would get in a lot of trouble and I wanted to protect him."
When she was asked why she thought her father may get in trouble, she replied: "Because he wasn't there operating with me."
The trial continues.