A mother has told how she tried to scale a barrier in a bid to reach a “panicking” 11-year-old girl who fell from a river rapids ride at Drayton Manor theme park.
Evha Jannath was “propelled” from a six-seater vessel on Splash Canyon on May 9 2017, while on an end-of-year school trip with staff and friends from Jameah Girls Academy in Leicester.
An inquest at Stafford County Buildings has heard that Evha and other pupils on the circular vessel had been repeatedly standing up, and “reaching into the water”, against the rules, before it hit a barrier, sending her head first into the water.
Evha and four friends boarded the boat without a teacher, after school staff agreed to the pupils’ request to go on the ride unaccompanied.
Eyewitness Theresa Atkinson was at the park in Tamworth, Staffordshire, that day.
She was standing on the ride’s viewing platform with her young son in his pushchair, as she waited for her husband’s vessel to come into view.
She described then seeing Evha’s boat and that the girls were “leaning over and trying to scoop water at each other”.
Atkinson recalled looking at her young son and thinking “If you do something stupid like that when you’re older, you’re getting a smack”.
Asked on Tuesday by assistant coroner Margaret Jones if she was “concerned” for the girls’ safety, Atkinson replied: “Not concerned. I thought they were being a bit silly, they shouldn’t have been doing what they were doing.”
As the schoolgirls’ boat passed her, she remembered in the “blink of an eye” that they started 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.”
Atkinson added: “She looked like she was panicking and I shouted to her to stay where she was. I didn’t want her to let go, I didn’t know if she could swim or whether she was hurt, I didn’t know anything.”
She went on: “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.”
She added: “She was wearing a full, black dress, I didn’t want her to get caught in the mechanism … so that is when I decided I would rush down to the photo booth.”
It took her “three to four minutes” to get to the booth, where there was a female member of staff, Hayley Dyson.
“I calmly said a girl had fallen into the water, at the end of the ride,” said Atkinson.
“I don’t think she believed me at first, or maybe she may not have heard me, probably because I was saying it so calmly – so I repeated myself.”
Returning to the viewing platform and looking to where she had last seen Evha, she told the inquest: “She wasn’t there, so I assumed they had pulled her out.”
Giving her evidence, Dyson said she rang the ride operators, after Atkinson came over to tell her to “stop the ride, because there’s someone in the water”.
She added: “At the start of the conversation, I said ‘There’s somebody in the water, the ride needs to be stopped now, it needs to be looked at’.”
Her colleagues on the ride replied that 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.
On Monday, the inquest heard that Evha, who was unable to swim, initially fell into water up to her thighs.
CCTV showed her then wading along the edge of the ride route, towards the exit platform, trying to get back to her friends.
She then attempted to climb the ride’s “travelator” which lifts the vessels up out of the water, to an exit platform, but fell into a 12ft deep area of water.
Some 11 minutes after staff were alerted to Evha originally going into the water, she was spotted face down.
It was another six minutes before theme park staff were able to pull her out, when she was described as “lifeless”, and was later pronounced dead in hospital.