Grenfell fire: Trapped woman threatened to jump from 18th floor with children, inquiry hears

A woman trapped in Grenfell Tower as it burned threatened to jump out her window with her partner and two young children, the inquiry into the inferno has heard.

Firefighters told Genet Shawo, who lived on the 18th floor of the highrise, to stay inside her flat and put wet towels under the windows and doors to stop smoke coming in.

But as the fire reached her apartment, she told her friends on the phone she would jump because there was “no way out”.

“I kept telling Genet to leave, and she kept saying that the smoke was too bad for her to leave,” 19th-floor resident Meron Mekonnen told the inquiry in a written statement.

“After the third and fourth phone call Genet told me that the fire was coming and she was going to jump out the window with her partner and children.”

Ms Mekonnen’s aunt, Hiwot Dagnachew, who fled the fifth floor of Grenfell Tower and also knew Ms Shawo, also gave evidence to the inquiry on Tuesday.

She wept and asked for a break in proceedings when she was questioned about the mother’s desperate phone calls.

“She asked me to tell the firefighters to catch her as they were all going to jump from their flat as she told me there was no way out,” she said in her written statement.

“I was distraught and kept telling her not to jump, I was begging her not to jump because I knew that the cladding was on fire and if they did jump they would land in the fire.

“I spoke to police officers near the police cordon and pleaded with them to do something about Genet’s family.

“I kept telling them that there was a woman stuck in flat 153 on the 18th floor with two young children who was about to jump. I asked them repeatedly to send help for her. One of them made a phone call about her.”

Later that night, Ms Shawo told Ms Dagnachew she had made it out of the tower with her husband and son, Lucas, but she had lost her five-year-old, Isaac, during their desperate escape bid.

“She asked me if I knew where Isaac was, I was distraught when she told me that Isaac was missing and I had to pass the phone to someone else, I was in pieces,” she said.

Each time I called her, she kept saying, ‘I cannot find him.’ She was totally distraught and was screaming. It was so painful and awful.”

The family later learnt the five-year-old had died in the tower’s staircase.

From the grass outside the tower, Ms Dagnachew said she saw Behailu Kebede, who lived in the flat where the fire broke out on the fourth floor. She had lived in the tower for around 25 years and had known Mr Kebede since she was a child, she said.

“Behailu was in shock. No one was with him ... he was clearly very shaken,” she said. Mr Kebede’s friend Berkti and her son Biruk lived on the 18th floor, she said, and he later learned they died in the fire.

Reflecting on the effect of the fire has had on her, Ms Dagnachew said: “I keep seeing those who have died in the faces of people in the street. I still walk in the direction of home to the tower and when I get there I see that it has been boarded up.”

She had been plagued by feelings of guilt over not doing more to alert her neighbours, she said.

“I was in a state of panic and shock getting out of the tower and I have since had terrible guilt feelings for not knocking on our neighbours’ doors and for not bringing my phone out with me as that would have allowed me to call people I knew in the tower to tell them to get out,” she said.

The feelings of helplessness and guilt “will stay with me forever”, she added.

In her final remarks to the inquiry, Ms Dagnachew said: “There’s been one burning question which has been with me since I have heard the earliest firefighters’ evidence.

“How is it that the incident commander did not know that fire was raging through flats as well, not just on the outside?” she asked.

“We have heard early on in the evening [that] radio communications, there wasn’t any congestion, they were still able to communicate with each other, so what did that firefighter do with that vital information we gave, because I have always thought since then ... people we loved, people that died that evening, had there been an early evacuation decision, most of them would have been here today.”

The London Fire Brigade (LFB) has been criticised for initially telling residents to remain in their flats despite the speed and ferocity of the blaze’s spread.

The basis of the stay-put policy is that fire should not spread between compartments, so a person in an unaffected part of the building should be able to remain in their flat and await rescue safely.

This was changed almost two hours after the fire started.

Ms Dagnachew said she first became aware of the fire at about 1.15am and had fled the building within minutes, telling a firefighter on the way down that it had spread to her flat.

She continued: “This was very early in the night and so many people could have been evacuated.

“We’ve lost so many people because they were told to stay put.”

She added through tears: “I was standing there [outside the tower], looking for people, for faces, for so many to come out.

“I was waiting for my friends, for my neighbours to come out.

“Why was the policy not changed early on? Why were no people evacuated early on?”

Inquiry chair Sir Martin Moore-Bick responded: “Well it’s an important question and one which we will do our very best to answer.”

The inquiry also heard from Maher Khoudair, who was given a ninth-floor flat in the council block, despite needing crutches to walk.

He recalled people pushing past him as he struggled to get out of the tower on the night of the blaze.

“No one helped me. I was sitting on the stairs to rest before carrying on. I made sure my back was away from the stair rail so people could get past and not push me,” he said in a written statement that was translated from his native Arabic.

He said he thought: “‘I am going to be pushed and fall head first on the stairs and be trampled on. This is it, my life’s over’.”

Mr Khoudair said he eventually made it out of the tower block.

All three survivors who gave evidence on Tuesday reported gaps between their windows and their walls following a refurbishment that finished in 2016.

Tuesday was the fourth day of evidence from survivors to the Grenfell Tower Inquiry, which is sitting in Holborn Bars, a conference centre in central London.