Youngest Hillsborough victim pulled from 'horrific' scene, inquests hear
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Version 0 of 1. The 10-year-old boy who was the youngest of the 96 people to die at Hillsborough was found on the football ground’s terraces in a scene which was “like hell”, the new inquests into the disaster have heard. A police officer pulled the boy, Jon-Paul Gilhooley, from a pile of bodies at the front of the “pens” of Hillsborough’s Leppings Lane terrace on 15 April 1989, the day he went to watch the FA Cup semi-final between Liverpool and Nottingham Forest. You couldn’t breathe; it was terrible to get your breath Inspector Philip Woodward, the South Yorkshire officer who went into pen three to try to bring the casualties out, said he saw Jon-Paul lying partially obscured by other bodies towards the top of the pile and assessed him to be about 10, the same age as his own son. “It was quite horrific,” Woodward told the inquests in Warrington. “It was just like walking into hell.” Christina Lambert QC, representing the coroner Sir John Goldring, told the court that Jon-Paul’s uncle, Brian Gilhooley, had just got the Leppings Lane terrace ticket on the morning of the semi-final. He wanted Jon-Paul, who was the first cousin of the current Liverpool captain Steven Gerrard, to have the chance to go to the match, and went to the local swimming pool to pick him up and take him to Hillsborough. Rodney Jolly and Glen Flatley, two of Jon-Paul’s adult family friends, told the court that they went to the Leppings Lane terraces with Jon-Paul because the Gilhooley uncles, Brian and John, had tickets in Hillsborough’s seated area. When they arrived at the turnstiles it was “chaos”, Jolly said. They entered the ground through gate C, a concertina exit gate, which the inquests have heard the police ordered to be opened to relieve the crush in front of the turnstiles. Once inside pen three, Jolly said, he had Jon-Paul, who was 1.45 metres (4ft 9in) tall, in front of him while a crush developed in a series of surges and became “horrible”. Flatley described how he found it impossible to breathe and slowly accepted he was going to die. “It was these surges,” Jolly said. “You couldn’t breathe; it was terrible to get your breath. “I was shouting out to try to get someone’s attention, that I had a child in my care.” He then lost consciousness and next found himself on the Hillsborough pitch, realising he was alive because he could smell the grass and see the sky. This was a 10-year-old boy; somehow you feel like trying to keep going Flatley, who has gone blind during the 26 years since the disaster, described the crush as like being pressed between “two massive slabs of concrete”, making breathing impossible. “I remember thinking: this has got to stop, it’s got to give soon,” he said, “but it didn’t. It seemed to go on for minutes. It seemed a long, long time. I literally just took air into my mouth, but there was no lung expansion whatsoever. You just could not breathe. “It had become so bad that I had accepted I was about to die. I knew that death was imminent; I just couldn’t see any way out of it. Then everything became serene, peaceful. It seemed to become quiet. Then I just relaxed, and all of a sudden something in front of me gave, and I could breathe again.” After Woodward worked to clear the pile of bodies from pen three, Jon-Paul was carried to the back of the Leppings Lane stand by somebody who was not identified and thrust into the hands of an arriving police constable, Graham Butler. He had been told to go there because there was crowd trouble, but found dead and injured people in a scene he also described as “like hell”. He rushed Jon-Paul, while trying to give him mouth to mouth resuscitation, to the first ambulance which had arrived outside the exit gate. Two ambulance officers, Harold Wadsworth and Jane Moffatt, told of the steps they took, unsuccessfully, to try to revive Jon-Paul while they drove him to Sheffield’s Northern General hospital. Wadsworth agreed with Lambert that his persistent efforts were partly prompted by emotion because Jon-Paul was so young. “You couldn’t get away from that,” Wadsworth said. “There were others lying around [dead or injured] by the time we left, but they were adults. This was a 10-year-old boy; somehow you feel like trying to keep going.” A photograph of the clothes recovered from Jon-Paul’s body after he died was shown on the courtroom screens: a blue and black anorak, red Puma tracksuit top, a blue denim shirt, blue jeans and blue Adidas training shoes. Jon-Paul’s mother, Jackie Gilhooley, sat in the courtroom’s public seats silently listening, with around 100 people from other families whose relatives died at Hillsborough. The individual circumstances of each of the 96 people who died are being examined in this phase of the inquests, which continue. |