We were first there, first on the scene.
Words can't explain it.
It was just mayhem.
It felt like I was in the middle of a disaster movie.
The one whole side of the building was just, like, completely in flames.
I'd never seen anything like that.
Well, it's terribly cold, aren't it?
How is that possible?
When people saw a disaster like this happening in the U.K., there was this sense of, how could this have been allowed to happen here?
It seems to me there's bits of the building falling off now.
I've never seen anything like it.
It's like we're having our own 9-11, mate.
At Grenfell, you had something completely different, which I'd never seen before, which was a fire engulfing the whole building.
Oh, my gosh!
Someone help them!
And it was obvious that something had gone desperately wrong.
There are many questions, most urgently about the cladding on this building.
Arconic made the aluminum cladding in question.
I do remember thinking somebody had been grossly negligent.
What happened here?
How did that get sold?
I don't understand that.
Tests have been manipulated.
Tests have been hidden.
We've got so much evidence now of really serious wrongdoing, and still no one's been arrested.
The warnings this building was a fire trap apparently went unheard.
This is a police crime scene.
What do we want?
Justice!
When do we want it?
Now!
We want answers!
I always think to myself, you know, why?
Why did this have to happen?
People are losing their lives, you know.
Losing friends, family.
I just think to myself, why?
Back in 2017,
I remember quite a few famous songs at the time.
Despacito was a big one.
I remember my mum kept playing it in the house and in the car.
It's your girl Essie, and you're listening to the biggest station in West London.
This is 100% the song of the summer.
It's J-House with Did You See?
Yeah.
I was excited because I was going into year eight.
You know, it was becoming summertime, it was becoming hot.
I would definitely say I was very bubbly.
I was very happy.
I always wanted to do good in my grades.
Yeah, I was a good, happy 12-year-old.
I do remember later on that night, we just went out for dinner.
By the time we drove back, it must have been about 11.30.
And then I got a text from a friend, fancy going on Xbox.
Played a few games, got work tomorrow, switched off and went to bed.
So, yeah, it was as simple as that, really.
Feeling very warm again with a top temperature of 26 Celsius, 79 Fahrenheit.
I think I went off to bed around midnight.
I was, uh, sleeping in the gym around that time, just because I didn't like sleeping in the dorm, um, with a load of smelly firefighters.
Fire brigade.
What this?
The bells went down about five to one.
So being the local station at North Kensington, Grenfell Tower is on our grounds.
On arrival, we saw some smoke coming out of a window, which we knew was where the fire was.
We made our way into the tower.
The two firefighters got ready in all their breathing apparatus.
You could hear them breaking the door down, and then they entered the flat.
It was your everyday kitchen fire, which they managed to put out quite quickly.
As you do after you've put the fire out, you use your thermal imaging camera to have a look around to check, make sure there's no hot spots, and that's when they notice the droplets of flame dripping and they realize that the fire had got out.
I've sent the second crew in to back them up.
I've been to other fires where the fire has got into a flat above.
Although it was unusual, it wasn't beyond possibilities that the fire could move up to the flat above.
So I had no reason to believe we wouldn't soon be going back to the station to carry on our night shift.
I got to the ground floor where I met a young girl who explained to me that her little sister was on the 20th floor and was it all right for her to go up and get her.
She told me her name was Jessica.
I thought I would quickly go up and bring her little sister down to her and then carry on with what I was doing.
I wasn't worried at all.
I pressed the 20th floor.
And suddenly the light came on on the 15th floor.
The doors opened, and a huge rush of black smoke just filled the lift.
I thought, I'm in trouble here, I need to get out.
I need my breathing apparatus for one, and I need to get down as quick as I can to get this girl out of her flat.
The breaking news this morning, that a major fire has engulfed a tower block in West London.
and it's been confirmed as Grenfell Tower.
Questions about how a building that is of a concrete construction could have been engulfed by flame so quickly.
And the thing went up in seconds, just going up and up and up and up.
I'd never seen nothing like it.
It was like something out of a Hollywood disaster movie.
I've been writing about Grenfell for seven years.
If you added up all the articles I've written, it would be over a thousand by now.
When people saw a disaster like this happening in London, in the UK, there was this sense of, how could this have happened here?
Because it shook people's sense of the country they live in.
I think that that was a possibility here.
It's changed my life, really.
There was my career up until Grand Final, and there's my life since, and it's completely different.
I'd only been the news editor for, um, about five or six months, which is kind of a bit of a throwing in the deep end.
I think everyone probably remembers the first time they saw those images.
To be honest, you would not think at Cementfield
I think in the aftermath of a fire like Grenfell, there's a desire, I think, among the media, I would say, to find a simple scapegoat, a simple narrative, someone whose picture they can put in the paper, someone who they can paint as the bad guy who made this happen.
The Daily Mail newspaper ran a very aggressive piece which named the owner of the flat where the fire started
There's a suggestion on social media that it's something to do with, like, Islamic terrorism when the guy is an Ethiopian Orthodox Christian who had a picture of the Virgin Mary in his flat.
He was an Uber driver.
He'd lived in a flat on the fourth floor of Grenfell Tower for about 25 years.
Eighth floor, fourth floor.
Quick, quick, quick.
Warning.
the police suggested.
He'd go into witness protection because of the level of harassment.
Because once the Daily Mail started, all the other newspapers were trying to get their story about him too.
He was a survivor, you know, and a victim of what happened.
He had no responsibility at all for anything that happened at Grenfell Tower.
I did have this sense that something has gone deeply, deeply wrong here.
So you want to find people who understand fire safety risks in high-rise buildings, and you just want to ask them as many questions as you can.
I got a phone call early in the morning, and it was the BBC.
And then Sky News.
That was bad.
So I went online to see the news.
I immediately saw a massive fire.
I've been investigating fires in high-rise buildings for some time.
When I first saw the images of the fire, I knew it was probably because of cladding.
Very quickly, we started to look into ACM, which is a type of cladding.
ACM is aluminum composite material, so you can see it's aluminum here and aluminum here, and then in the middle of it, the thicker, darker part, is the polymer.
Polymers are plastics.
All plastics.
All plastics are flammable.
The polymer that is in the middle, the most popular one, is PE, polyethylene.
This happens to be raw PE.
We see that actually the material then becomes very flammable, and it isn't safe.
The reason why aluminum composite material is dangerous is because fire spreads really quickly, and it's difficult to put out.
This is a building material that's, by the 2010s, very popular.
It's on use in buildings in every continent.
Millions and millions of square meters of it are being sold.
And there are many companies around the world that were producing, marketing, and selling ACM.
And one of them was Alcoa.
You don't have to look far.
You're sitting in a hotel, sitting on a plane, checking your emails.
There's a good chance that the aluminum you're seeing has come from Alcoa Aluminum.
Alcoa was the aluminum company of America, shortened to Alcoa.
Sort of one of the older and bigger, historically, I would say, prestigious corporations in the United States.
A lot of products in different markets.
Wings for airplanes.
Aluminum panels in the automotive industry.
Very big on the stock market.
There was a feeling that the stock value could be unlocked by splitting up the company.
Arconic.
Innovation.
Engineered.
That's what became Arconic.
Arconic was a division of Alco.
As investigators assess the damage, one supplier has been thrust into the spotlight.
Arconic.
Arconic made the aluminum cladding in question.
Visible from miles away.
When the fire happened, I found out Arconic had been involved.
And I can remember thinking, I really hope they didn't put polyethylene panels.
Because it's a petroleum-based product, it's going to burn, and it's going to burn vigorously.
So on a high-rise building, thinking about when you have something that is highly flammable, people don't have the time to evacuate.
Families had been sleeping here.
Some were still trapped inside.
And then later on, it came out in the news that it had been the polyethylene panels.
How did this get sold?
Why was it sold?
We wouldn't have sold it that way in North America.
How did this happen?
Behind each window was a home, many completely incinerated.
When I was offered Grenfell, I was slightly apprehensive about living in a tower block.
But my dad had always told me that you'll know when you walk into a property whether it's for you or not.
I definitely had that feeling when I walked into 134 Grenfell Tower.
I did actually fall in love with it.
I got a call from Andrea.
She was like, yeah, I've got news.
I said, yes.
We were gonna make a home, really.
Like, a permanent home.
I think I was either two or just about to turn two when we moved there.
So, like, I say Grenfell was my home.
From my bedroom window, I would always see the London Eye.
I felt lucky, in a way, because we were getting, like, a bird's-eye view.
And obviously, not a lot of people get that.
Oh, my days, man.
So we were sleeping.
Now, when you're sleeping, you hear constant commotion.
It's not one thing that wakes you up.
It's, like, constant commotion.
At that same time, our neighbor banged on our door.
Like, literally, bang, bang, bang.
So Andrea got up to open the door.
It was Helen and her daughter, Lulia.
And they were like, there's a fire.
There's a fire.
And I said, come in.
Let's try and figure out what's going on.
I remember my neighbor was waking me up, and obviously I thought that was weird.
Why are you here in the middle of the night?
I was very confused, and then she told me that there was a fire.
My sister Megan, she was still sleeping.
I asked my mom if I should wake her up, and my mom said, no, not yet.
Just in case, you know, there's no need to.
You know, I thought the fire was just gonna stay in that flat, and that was it.
I was trying to look out the window from the 21st floor.
All I could see was the lights from the fire brigade.
Yeah, I felt everything was gonna be okay.
I didn't feel in danger at all.
I still didn't really comprehend the scale of the fire.
Anyone with LSD?
I knew that I needed to find this little girl, Jessica.
I was really worried because smoke was everywhere and this little girl's on her own.
Ran down the stairs.
Don't remember passing anyone else, any public or firefighters.
I got to the ground floor.
It was pandemonium back this time.
There was a lot of chat on the radio.
Firefighters were breathing their praise, waiting to go in.
Got my BA set.
I kind of jogged into the building.
When I saw two firefighters from my station, I explained that Jessica was on the 20th floor and we need to get up there to get her out.
We looked for flat 176.
The door was slightly ajar.
The flat was filled with smoke.
We searched the flat twice.
We were shouting.
We was banging.
We was doing everything we could.
But we couldn't find her.
We desperately hoped she had left the flat and made her way downstairs.
Yeah, that's what I hoped.
In the UK, we have this policy called Stay Put, which is the belief that we've built buildings in a way that means the fire will stay in the flat where it started for two hours.
And the London Fire Brigade placed complete faith in the stay-put policy and this idea that fires in UK tower blocks never spread from flat to flat.
But by 1.30 in the morning, the fire has started to enter dozens of flats around the tower.
There's dozens of individual flats on fire.
Despite these conditions in the building, people are being told to stay put.
I was lying in bed, and I hear my neighbor's smoke alarm going, ping, ping, ping.
And then about, like, five minutes later, I heard some shouting.
And at that time of night, that really wasn't normal.
And, like, my first thought was, like, we've been advised to stay put.
I think what I'll probably do is just, like, stay in my flat, call the fire brigade.
But at that moment, my mobile phone rang.
It was a neighbor of mine from downstairs who'd already managed to exit the building.
And he shouted at me.
He shouted at me in such a powerful way.
Get out.
Get out of the building."
There was something so powerful about what he said that I just made the decision there and then, I'm gonna go.
And then joined a kind of, like, small crowd of some residents, some onlookers.
That fire was so violent.
That was the most violent thing that I've ever seen in my life.
My first phone call to the LFB, I think I was still quite calm.
I didn't want to try and portray any nerves or being scared or anything to the girls.
You know, we're in this flat, flat 183, 21st floor.
I'm here with my pregnant wife.
They were speaking to the command center and they were going to send help.
I said it to the girls, let's just be prepared to go.
Because the idea was, as soon as they bang on the door, we're getting out.
I know my dad called them multiple times.
They were telling us to stay inside.
But the fire was getting closer, so it didn't make no sense.
Yeah, we're going.
I remember me and my mum, you know, kept telling him, you know, call them back, call them back.
Oh, my gosh.
How has someone helped them?
Oh, my gosh.
Central to the tragedy of Grenfell, flammable cladding.
The cladding made by Arconic, a multinational corporation.
In September 2007, Arconix marketing manager, a guy called Gerald Sontag, took a corporate trip to an industry conference in Norway.
One of the presentations given at that conference was about aluminium composite material, about how dangerous this product was.
and it actually compared it to sticking a petrol tanker to the outside of a building.
So it's about as clear and stark a warning as you can imagine.
And there's a member of Arconic's senior team sitting in the audience, listening to this presentation.
We came back from this conference quite frightened, knowing that Arconic was selling the flammable version of the ACM.
What he did was write a very blunt warning to his seniors of a fire involving this material killing 60 to 70 people.
And that warning was made in 2007, ten years before Grenfell.
But unfortunately, I don't think that warning would have come to those people as a surprise.
because Arconic had actually already tested that product, but they were keeping that result secret.
Arconic ran two tests.
One of them tests the product when it's fitted to a wall and hammered in with rivets.
The other one tests the product when it's been bent into an L shape and then hung and clicked into rails which hold it on the building, what they would call cassette shape.
The difference between rivets or cassettes is mostly about the aesthetics.
And what we have learned is that the cassette one, by bending the ECM, it allows a pool of the fire drips to accumulate.
And that creates a massive fire at the bottom of the cassette.
And it happens every one of the cassettes.
It burns ten times as quickly.
It releases seven times as much heat.
Three times as much smoke.
Arconic reacted in a way that instead of embracing the results, learning from them, and delivering safety to people through their products, they pretty much did the opposite.
And I wish they had acted on it.
In 2011, Arconic did another test of ACM planning.
What they discovered was a very fast, very large fire that had to be stopped.
Claude Verla was a technical manager at Arconic during this period.
And actually, ironically enough, a volunteer firefighter.
So the laboratory emailed Claude, and they said, hello, Mr. Verla.
We have performed a test on your reference.
Note, all of large pieces of the small wing, widespread fire on the surface, reaching critical values, resulting in the termination of the ongoing test.
If a product fails a test, you contain product or you stop product, you stop production, you don't let anything else go to the customer.
You would never ignore and walk away.
Nothing changed.
They kept selling it.
There's an internal iconic email where they say, the grade of the panel following the test today is an F, which is just uncategorizable, ungradeable.
And then just the word, oops,
They learned that once you bent this product into a certain shape, you were going to get this terrible result in a fire.
And unfortunately, that is the shape that ended up being used on Grenfell Tower.
The most thing that I used to love is having my coffee next to my window in Grenfell Tower, listening to different types of music with my brother Mohammed.
That life is very peaceful.
The tower used to look nice.
I was like, okay, I mean, that's a good place, let's move there.
So me and my brother Mohamed moved to this apartment around September 2016.
Me and Mohamed, we had just one year between us.
We were very close.
He was my best friend, I would say, not just my brother.
I managed to get into university, as well the same for my brother, Mohammed.
Then we managed to find a job.
We were happy together.
We were happy in that apartment.
That night,
I started to hear some noise.
People outside screaming, ambulance cars, police cars.
So straight away, I left my room.
And as soon as I left my room, I saw as well my brother in the corridor area saying, Omar, I can smell a smoke.
You know, had our pajamas on.
We were like, let's leave.
As soon as we opened the door, we were shocked by the amount of the smoke in the corridor.
We went to the windows, we were, like, shouting to the people, saying, hey, hey, help.
Police or fire brigades told us, like, stay, we are coming to you.
We were like, okay, they're doing something and they will come to us to bring us out or, like, give us something to protect us and then leave.
Coming from Syria,
For me, living in the UK, I was thinking that I am in the right safe place.
In the years leading up to the Grenfell Tower fire, there were a lot of groups who were pushing the government quite hard for change in terms of building safety regulations.
And that was particularly because of a fire in 2009 at a building called Lackanell House in South London.
Firefighters arrived at the building within minutes, but the blaze was so ferocious, it was hours before they reached the bodies of the six victims, which included two children and a baby.
It was a quick, very fast, voracious fire.
There was combustible and flammable material used in the building's fabric, which contributed to the speed of the fire at the time.
Larkin Oil House was a huge opportunity for this country to take notice and to improve fire safety measures.
Our group was meeting with various MPs in Westminster.
We did push for change as hard as we could without physically door-stopping them and grabbing them by the hand or even the neck.
I had to work out ways to prove that the guidance relevant to fire was not fit for purpose.
It was badly designed for use, and there was factually incorrect information provided.
You would have to start the document at the beginning, and then flip to the back, and then flip to somewhere in the middle, and it was just awful.
After the Lackanell House fire, there was a coroner's inquest, which resulted in the coroner writing a letter to government and to the London Fire Brigade, which called for change.
She said we needed to train call handlers.
The London Fire Brigade needed to work out how to fight fires in a high-rise building when they got out of control.
Government policy needed to define when we switched away from this stay-put policy.
Many sheltered in their bathrooms, and when they phoned 999, the fatal advice was to stay put.
Well, I think with hindsight, had the advice been to get out earlier in the call when the people were involved, then that may have contributed to them staying alive or being saved.
It's out there.
It's a letter.
It's black and white.
It's clear.
The letter that the Lackanaw House coroner wrote to government was really important, but unfortunately, it landed at a really bad time.
One of the key aims of this coalition is to massively reduce the number of rules, laws and regulations that, frankly, treat all of you like idiots.
We're going to have a new rule, which is that any minister in my government who wants to introduce a regulation has to scrap one first.
Which we've now changed to the one-in, two-out rule.
You've got to get rid of two regulations if you want to introduce a new one.
One of David Cameron's driving political ideologies was deregulation.
He believed that the state had no place telling private businesses what they should and shouldn't do.
We want to get out of your way by deregulating, by cutting your taxes.
Excessive rules have given the impression that we have a right to a risk-free life.
So effectively what he'd done was ban new fire safety regulations being introduced, even if they were necessary.
The Prime Minister said, we're going to release some of our brightest, most intelligent civil servants to kick the living daylights out of bureaucracy.
Eric Pickles was the most senior politician with responsibility for... By dismantling interfering intrusive laws and regulations, we can do even more for less.
He wanted less regulation on business.
So what the coroner was asking them to do was increase regulation.
And internally, a civil servant wrote, well, the law requires us to respond to the coroner, but we don't actually have to do what she says.
And the way he phrased that was actually, we only need to respond to the coroner, we don't need to kiss her backside.
And that civil servant was Brian Martin.
Good afternoon, everybody.
It was interesting.
He was certainly a character.
He did have an interesting manner to him.
He had a bit of a reputation for being very difficult.
I joined the civil service not because I wanted to work hard.
And so it came as a bit of a shock when pretty much that's what we've been doing ever since.
Brian Martin had more power than most MPs.
We all had to go to him and he was the gateway through to government.
He was tasked with the building regulations with respect to fire safety.
We've got the strategy division at the top.
I'd like to tell you what they do.
I haven't worked it out yet.
But they're very busy being strategic.
In terms of pushing Brian Martin to effect change, we asked him what needed to happen.
And he did say to me that government won't do anything until there are deaths.
And he allegedly said to colleagues of mine, show me the bodies.
The LFB are overwhelmed in the call centre.
The volume of calls is unlike anything these call handlers have ever experienced before.
They're overflowing now to other control rooms around the country, because that's what happens if so many 999 calls are coming in at once.
But all of these call handlers give the orthodox advice to residents of Tower Block Fires, which is, stay put.
We know that from the Lacana House, they could have realized that this was the wrong call for a high-rise building.
And what they don't have is a television.
There's a plasma screen TV in the room, but it's not working.
So what they don't see at any point is a visual image of what's happening at Grenfell Tower.
All they have on their screen is a line of information which says, fourth floor kitchen, partially alight.
27th floor, female, three children, if you will.
Two adults trapped, they've rolled out.
Occupants trapped on the 11th, 10th, and I think 15th floor.
Five people trapped on the 17th floor.
16th floor.
18th floor.
22nd floor.
17th.
11th floor.
Female, possibly two children.
Three children, if you will.
I can't remember the exact road where I first saw the tower.
But it was over to my left, and fire coming up one side of the building.
How is that possible?
I don't ever remember being in Grenfell Tower before, so I didn't understand.
I didn't know the layout.
I was really focused on just getting inside and doing what we could do.
We were struck by how narrow the stairs were.
Firefighters were coming down with casualties with people.
They call out, casualty.
Every time we heard that, you're moving into the corner of the stairwell with your cylinder on your back, trying to give as much space as you can.
And people are coming down crying, coughing, spluttering, some conscious, some unconscious.
It felt chaotic.
It felt like everybody was caught a little bit off guard by this.
After waiting, the firefighters arrived.
So we're like, OK, are we leaving now?
He was like, no, you need to move all to the apartment next to you, and we're going to come back to you.
I remember, like, as soon as I entered the apartment, seeing a lot of people there, including the resident of the flat and his family.
I've seen Zainab.
and her son, Dennis.
And then there was my brother and me.
Muhammad brought a Qur'an from our apartment.
For some time, he was reading Qur'an.
He was like, this is gonna help.
And it kept him, like, strong as well.
But we didn't understand what's gonna happen next.
All I wanted, really, was to be rescued.
Andrea was seven months pregnant.
She's also asthmatic, and so has Megan.
Just wanted an air tank, some kind of mask, so that we can go.
I remember my dad filling up the bathtub with water and literally just putting in so many towels, making sure they're drenched.
Each moment, things was just getting worse and worse, to the point when I opened the door to see what was going on, it was just smoke.
The smoke was extremely thick, black.
Every time I opened the door and tried to breathe, it was just gagging cessation.
It was, like, chemically infused.
Smoke from plastics is particularly toxic.
It's asphyxiating.
You bring something that will make you cough.
It will make you sick instantly.
It will quickly make you faint.
You start to lose consciousness, and you don't even realize that you're losing consciousness.
The smoke was starting to get thicker.
It was dirty smoke.
This was very dirty smoke.
Couldn't see anything in front of your face.
Torches weren't making a difference.
We were burning.
We were feeling extreme heat then.
None of it made sense why it was so extremely hot in there.
None of it made sense to me.
This tower was redecorated from the outside recently as part of a council initiative.
They've covered it with, like, a kind of plastic paneling to make it look neater and make it look better.
They suspect that that might not have been, you know, a safe construction.
It's all right.
They've been warned.
There's nothing more.
Just make sure no one else gets up there.
My brother, Raymond, a.k.a.
Moses, he lived on the 23rd floor in flat 201.
He was a real cheeky, cheeky person.
He had a beautiful smile.
When he smiled at you, you kind of melted into his smile.
Ray grew up in Trinidad.
30 years.
I did most of Ray's admin, so I would either write or call the talent management organization and his TMO.
If I had to sum up my relationship on behalf of my brother with the council slash TMO, I would say it was appalling.
After all, he was paying to live there.
It wasn't a gift.
He wasn't living there free of charge.
We were kind of just being treated as if we didn't matter.
Almost seen as, you know, we're working class or poor.
But that was far from the truth.
You had IT consultants, you had people that work in NHS, you had teachers, you had architects.
It wasn't a poor tower, it was a working tower.
Grenfell Tower was in Kensington, which, even in the context of London, is an unusual place.
Kensington is both one of the wealthiest areas of London and one of the poorest.
The Tower was an eyesore for the affluent who lived in the area, and I think it just kept property prices down.
Grenfell Tower was built in the 1970s, but it had not been well looked after by the Council.
It had never been a major refurbishment.
This new glossy school and leisure centre complex was being built, but it had this tower block next to it, which didn't look quite so good.
And so they said in internal emails that maybe overcladding Grenfell Tower would be a good idea because it would help the tower appear less of a poor cousin.
They were going to overclad the building.
They were going to put new windows into the tower.
The windows really weren't fit for purpose anymore.
The cladding came as a kind of, like, a bit of a shock to us all.
I didn't even know it was called cladding.
I don't even think I'd heard that word.
So when the architects first designed the cladding system, they specified a zinc cladding panel.
And that would be completely non-combustible.
It's just made of metal.
I attended pretty much every single consultation meeting.
We were never, ever shown hard copies of what the cladding was going to look like.
The council went out to the market to try and find the cheapest contractor.
In the end, the organization they found was a company called Raiden.
During the refurb, Ray and I often spoke, and he often said to me, the workmanship is really poor.
Myself and others who stood up and questioned, we were labeled rebels.
We raised concerns with one of the senior managers from Rydens at that point and said, you know, how would you like it if this was being done in your home?
And he turned around to us and he said, if I was getting it for nothing, I wouldn't mind.
That comment
sums up the whole way that we were treated by Raidens, TMO, RBKC.
We were scroungers, we were getting something for nothing, we didn't deserve anything, so just shut up and let us get on with the work.
During the refurbishment, the Kensington & Chelsea tenant management organization would hold conversations with Ryden about ways they could strip even more money out of the job.
How can we save every penny?
And one of the first things they did to save that money was switch that sink cladding panel for the cheapest cladding product they could find.
And the cheapest cladding product they could find was aluminum composite material with a pure polyethylene core.
and Arconic sold the cladding for use at Grenfell Tower.
I found out that in 2009, there was a fire at an office block in Bucharest.
And this alarmed technical manager, Claude Verla, because it was a building with ACM on it.
He found images of that fire online and sent them to his seniors.
The fire in Bucharest wasn't the last time these warnings were raised.
The industry were concerned about the number of building fires because a number of them had this type of cladding.
There was another fire, this time in France, and this one was, sadly, a fatal fire.
It killed a disabled woman inside the building.
There were changes in France, which meant that the more combustible type of this cladding could no longer be sold there.
And there were other countries around Europe that brought similar changes in.
But Claude Wöhler's view was, we can still work in markets which are not as restrictive.
And unfortunately, the UK was a market that was not restrictive.
There were internal emails where our colleagues said, you can do anything in England with this combustible product.
At the time of the Grenfell renovation, the technology was PE, and then you had the FR material, which was flame retardant.
In North America, there were certain projects that called for the FR.
Particularly if it was over two stories high, you were gonna go for FR.
The refurbishment finally finished in 2016, and the council were pleased with the work they'd done.
A press release went out saying that it was remarkable to see firsthand how the cladding had lifted the external appearance of the building.
But you now had 120 homes covered in highly combustible plastic.
I don't think the building needed any doing up.
It was just a concrete tower.
I mean, I felt safe in that concrete tower, so, you know, I would think they would have put safety in front of prettiness.
Based on how I saw Arconic operate, I would find it very difficult to believe that anybody didn't know that this was going on that particular building.
It would have cost £2 per square metre more.
Across the whole building, that works out to about £5,000.
If you split it per flat, it's about £40 per flat to use the safer version.
But because there was such a focus on saving money and using the cheapest product, it wasn't even considered.
It's about £40 per flat.
The first phone call I received was actually from a friend.
She said, there's a fire in the block.
Where is Ray?
We have no word on the number of people who are in that building.
So I went downstairs, turned the TV on, and that's when I realized what was going on.
I tried calling his phone, and there was no response.
And all I can remember thinking at the time was, hopefully, Ray's apartment is not affected.
Hopefully, Ray will be okay.
I made my way down to Labrador Grove.
It was just... an inferno.
But I honestly believed it would be dealt with.
Because...
It's the United Kingdom.
With regards to residents still in the block, their advice is, if there's anyone on the phone to someone who's still in a flat, is to please try and escape or get out by any other means they can.
Stayport was revoked in the control room at 2.35 on the incident ground at 2.47am.
By this point, there are over 100 people still inside Cranfield Tower.
I remember a senior officer giving a speech to firefighters.
It sounded like a rallying cry.
Listen, this is like nothing you're ever gonna face, but there's still savable life in there, and we're gonna have to put you in very dangerous situations.
We didn't have a clue where we were.
We were shouting out for people.
and there was nothing coming back.
There was flashes of torches as people were walking around, running around.
And all of a sudden, a firefighter appeared with a lady who was unconscious.
He was on his own with her.
He was visibly distressed.
So we grabbed her.
We were, like, falling all over the place with her as well.
It was so difficult to get your foot in.
We got her back down to the ground floor and we passed her to the paramedics section.
There was nothing to wait around for.
Just case of getting back inside and trying to help save people.
Every time we breathe the smoke, you're kind of breathing death.
Some of us used to open the door to try to see if we can escape.
I remember my neighbor was worried about his family, so he started to put sheets together.
He wanted to escape using the sheets from the window.
He actually tried.
They were very scared near my brother Mohamed.
Straight away, we pulled him in again.
Kids were crying, screaming.
And I remember Zainab crying.
And just people were very running around in the apartment, scared, not knowing what to do.
But the hope was that the firefighters would come back.
I was told that the fire was so intense on some of the other floors, residents had started to move up.
Some residents rang Ray's doorbell.
And at that point, his flat wasn't really consumed with a lot of smoke.
He let quite a few people into his flat.
It was women and children.
Ray was registered as disabled.
But there was no plan in place to evacuate disabled residents of Grenfell Tower.
He could see all that black smoke every time he opened his door.
But he still let them in.
He still gave them refuge.
It's my belief that Jessica probably accompanied the other adults into Ray's apartment
Jessica and my granddaughter attended the same school.
She knew Ray, and she knew she'd be safe with Ray.
I phoned the London Fire Brigade again to try and find out what's happening with the rescue unit, or where's the firefighters that are coming to rescue us.
I think at that time, they said, oh, yeah, I've spoken to you before.
You've called before.
And I said, yeah, I've spoken to LFP four times before.
Right, how many people are in now?
Six people, three kids, three adults.
Can't get out, and the smoke is in the house now.
Just can't get out, and plus, also, you've got the children.
Yes.
At some point, maybe a minute or two into that call, I kind of just looked into my bedroom, and all of a sudden, my window was alight, and it just raced towards me.
Get the fires in.
Fires in.
Get the wet towels.
You need to get your family outside.
We're doing it now.
So everything was like, I think it was kind of in a rush.
We covered ourselves with the blanket and my dad had put in the bathtub and I grabbed my dog.
and we just dashed it for the stairwell.
The conditions in the stairwell were horrific.
I was coughing, gagging a lot.
I didn't have any idea where they were.
My expectation was they're in front of me.
My dad was behind me.
I kept hearing his voice, and, like, behind me, you know, he kept shouting, you know, go on, just keep going, keep going.
And I just remember... I just remember stepping on so many bodies.
And then it got to a point where I couldn't hear my daddy anymore behind me.
He sounded like he was, like, far in front of me.
Like, don't listen to them.
Well... You know, I didn't hear nobody speak or say anything back to me.
Until that moment, I didn't want to say...
At that moment, I realized they're not in front of me.
They were behind me.
I just remember saying, I can't do it anymore.
Like, I can't carry on.
And I just remember placing my dog down on the stairwell, because I couldn't come out.
That was it.
That's all that I can remember.
Apparently, I had collapsed.
Everything just went pitch black.
Oh, my God.
They've allowed people to die, for fuck's sake.
Suddenly, our front door was opened.
So the first thing I saw is, like, a firefighter.
And the second thing I saw is our neighbor and his family just leaving.
And then I remember someone pulling me from my neck or from my T-shirt, taking me out.
I could feel at that time the stare.
Someone was pushing me, telling me to move again.
But I didn't want to move because I was looking for my brother and for everyone else, and I couldn't see nothing.
On the third floor, I started to see a light again.
The first thing I did is to look around me to see, like, where is my brother?
And I couldn't see him.
I just called him.
I was like, where are you, Mohammed?
He was like, Omar, where are you?
Mohammed, like, they came to us.
They take me out.
So I thought they are taking you as well.
He was like, no, I couldn't see anyone.
No one came to us.
And I'm still here with Zainab, her son.
I said, like, all of you still there?
He said, yes.
I went straight to the five.
I told them, like, my brother, Zainab, they're all still there.
Please, are you getting obsessed?
Everyone was telling me, like, yes, yes.
I walked back down to the base of the tower.
And there's a guy there, and he's on the phone, and he's shouting, he's very animated.
My girl's in there, my girl's in there, he says.
My girl's in there.
I'm on the phone to her now.
I took the phone off him, and I said, hi, my name's Chris.
She tells me I'm on the 14th floor, and I'm with my two-year-old son.
My name's Adam, my name's Adam, and my son's Jeremiah.
I said, okay.
We're coming to get you.
You can't get out of that building, we will come and get you.
I can hear Jeremiah crying.
I go over to the fire survivor guidance.
I said, look, the 14th floor.
And he says to me, at the moment, at the moment, we can't go past the 12th.
I was on the phone for about 25, 30 minutes.
Jeremiah, he's not crying anymore.
There was a point when she told me that, um, Jeremiah's dead.
There was a point when she told me Jeremiah's dead.
I don't want to be here no more.
I want to be with him.
I want to be with my boy.
I said, come on, Zion, you stay with me, girl.
There's people that love you, that are waiting for you.
You know?
You need to get out of this building.
We can... I'm still telling them we're coming to get you.
I thought I heard her scream.
Just completely out of nowhere.
And in silence.
I kept the phone for about five minutes more.
Just in case.
I was on the phone with my brother, he's ringing and speaking to me.
The last conversation we had was like, Omar, I'm dying.
I'm dying here, that's it.
I could see Zeynep dying in front of my face, and her son, and Dennis as well.
And I'm dying, Omar.
My brother was kind of saying bye to me.
Hold the bell!
Come on!
Come on, girl!
Oh, come on.
At that moment, I figured out that Luana, um, she'd passed out.
I looked down in between the rails on the stairwell, and I could see a light.
Very faint, but I could see a light.
I kind of thought, God, that must be a firefighter.
I quickly ran down, and I shouted.
I said, my daughter's upstairs.
I need to go up.
I need to get this.
I've gone to go up with them, and then I've had another firefighter grab me from behind.
I went, no, you need to go.
Keep going down.
I saw Luana being carried out.
But I didn't know where my wife was.
I didn't know where Megan was.
When our Helen and Lulia were able to get up,
They handed me over to police.
They said, no, can't promise you anything, but there's a pregnant woman up there.
She's with another kid.
Without even seeing her, I kind of went, like, relieved.
Then I quickly turned and saw that Andrea was sitting by the tree and Megan was next to her.
Andrea asked, where's Luana?
Of course, I knew where Luana was.
She was to our side.
They're with us there now.
And then we got put in one ambulance.
All together.
Next thing I know, I woke up and I was in the ambulance and I was the only one on the bed.
You know, I just kept thinking, you know, why am I on this bed?
Like, I'm not the priority.
If anyone's the priority, it's my mum.
because obviously she was pregnant at the time.
And then I just, I fell back asleep again.
And yeah.
Police have confirmed a number of people have been injured and an evacuation is continuing.
So far, 12 people have died, more than 70 others are injured.
We've now been here for five and a half, nearly six hours, and not a single policeman, not a single representative from our landlord or from the council has turned up to speak to us.
There are people here who don't know whether their relatives are alive or dead.
of this female child being taken to hospital in an ambulance.
I think the evening of the 14th, and we had photographs and we were putting them up.
It was desperation because there was no information on where to go to try and find your brother, your sister, your mother, your cousin, whoever.
Mothers, where are the children?
week on since the Grenfell Tower fire and many residents are still complaining of a lack of support from the authorities.
Many are still sleeping in the local sports centre and some reportedly even in their cars.
We haven't met anyone from the councillors actually come here.
We want someone to actually tell the families what has happened to their loved ones that have gone missing.
It was obvious to the people who lived in Grantham Tower and had lost relatives that there was responsibility.
This wasn't an accident.
What people needed was clarity from the local authority and support.
The basic human rights that we all take for granted every day.
Food, shelter, clothing.
People sitting out there with no food, no houses.
People walking around lost in the streets.
Stickers of their kids pitched to their top.
No one's out here helping.
Many are livid at the government's response to the tragedy.
The convoy sped past, carrying the Prime Minister.
Theresa May spoke to emergency workers, but made no public appearance.
Theresa May steps down there and don't come and see none of us.
She don't walk round here.
Why didn't you meet the community straight away?
My decision not to go immediately to meet members of the community was because I always felt it had been to make sure that those emergency services had the resources that they needed, had everything they needed to do their job.
I realise now that actually one of the issues for the community and the survivors of Grenfell Tower was the way in which authority had failed to listen to them.
And I merely exacerbated that by not going to see them first off.
What began here in London today is a public inquiry into the Grenfell tragedy that claimed 72 lives.
I call the public inquiry so quickly because I thought it was important, given the scale of this tragedy, it was important that we really dug into what had happened.
My role as lead counsel to the inquiry was to be the public.
A curious member of the public who sees there's been a terrible fire and wants to know what happened and why it happened.
The public inquiry will look at the events of the night itself, including the response of the emergency services.
I do solemnly, sincerely and truly.
The problem with inquiry was the emotional difficulty and what one might call the forensic difficulty.
The whole truth.
And nothing but the truth.
The emotional difficulty one came very early on, when I examined the earlier rival firefighters, all about what happened on the night.
I decided to go up and try and get to the 20th floor to get a little sister.
There is some context here that I just need to show you based on your statement.
Could you please be shown page 7 of your statement?
I found what I thought was flat 176, but had to use my torch and put my face right up close to the door.
I moved on to the next door and saw that it was 175.
Did you...
knock on the door or shout to anybody who might be inside flat 175.
Can I just say... Yes, of course.
To the family of the people in flat 175, I was looking for another girl.
I didn't know there was anyone in there.
That's all right.
Thanks.
Thank you.
There was a lot of failure at an institutional level from London Fire Brigade.
There was failure on the ground as well.
You know, this operation didn't go well.
But I think you've got to remember as well the pain that must come from being the one who is tasked with saving people, but not being able to.
That's a really hard thing.
Just that alone, a really hard thing to have to live with.
Welcome to today's hearing, at which we're going to hear evidence from the Commissioner.
I swear by almighty God.
Before the inquiry, one of the big questions I had about the London Fire Brigade was, why didn't they learn the lessons from Lackanell House?
And nothing but the truth.
I learned that there was warnings to the London Fire Brigade.
We knew that buildings had cladding.
We had no training on cladding fires.
And from all the training I've had, we still relied totally on that state put policy up until Grenfell.
And we didn't really have a plan B.
a slideshow produced by the LFB.
There were a lot of revelations about the London Fire Brigade at the Grenfell Tower Inquiry, and particularly about how much they knew.
And I think the most startling example of that was a PowerPoint presentation, which went into a lot of detail about the risks of clouding fires.
Did you see this slideshow at the time it was produced?
No.
Can you explain why this presentation was kept to a limited coterie of LFB specialists so that even you didn't see it, Commissioner?
No, I've no idea.
This key document had not been seen by any of the frontline firefighters.
Suddenly people realised that this was an institutional problem.
This is not going to be the case of individual firefighters making mistakes on the night.
If we had turned up to that fire and had the knowledge to recognize that is a cladding fire, we can't stop that.
So let's not try, and let's evacuate the building.
If we had that knowledge, things would have looked a lot different.
People probably still would have died, would have many have died.
I don't know.
From quite an early stage, some of the witnesses that I was most keen to see were those who worked for Arconic, who have made the decision to keep this product on the market.
Despite the testing, despite the warnings, I wanted to see them asked, why did you do this?
Arconic is a huge global American company, but three of its employees are refusing to give evidence.
I think we've seen that the iconic witnesses that have chosen not to appear at the public inquiry are, in my opinion, nothing better than gutless cowards.
A UK public inquiry has the power to compel UK citizens to attend, but it has no power to do that for non-UK citizens.
We didn't hear from people like Claude Fowler, who did and do have a lot of questions to answer.
But there were emails that got released in a kind of huge package of emails that came from Arconic, which included Claude Verla using a phrase to the effect of, oh, my Lord, don't release that testing information to the client.
Oh, my gosh, how has someone helped them?
Senior people in the company telling staff to keep the true fire performance of the product very confidential.
Where's the people?
The email sent by Claude Werler saying, we are not clean.
Get out of the river!
What was being revealed was just this huge corporate scandal.
They knew that if this information made it into the public domain, people wouldn't buy their products anymore.
While investigating this, we discovered that during the Grenfell deal, a senior executive requested a fire safety report on cladding products.
She learned that PE cladding was unsuitable for buildings over 12 meters, and that the product even carried a risk of flaming droplets in a fire.
She was clearly told the higher the building, the stronger the fire resistance must be.
She was informed the company had sold thousands of square meters of PE for Grenfell Tower, earning 115,000 euros, but there were no questions around safety.
This is, like, the dark heart of sort of corporate, multinational culture, you know, where profit becomes so important that everything else is forgotten.
They're the companies behind Grenfell.
Arconic, Sellotex, makers of the flammable insulation.
Together with another firm, Kingspan, all these manufacturers heavily criticized for their materials used on the construction of Grenfell Tower.
So in the inquiry, I was asked to be shadow expert for the victims and bereaved.
My role was to help the lawyers, and I was called to go through the documents in a very intense process.
It emerged that Kingspan tested a product called K-15 back in 2005.
But the product it subsequently sold on the market was not the same.
You have Iconic doing this, and you have Celotex doing that, and you have Kingston doing that.
Show me a good example.
Show me a good person doing the right decision, appearing as the hero of the story.
There is no hero in the story.
The overwhelming cause of the rapid fire spread across the tower was the presence of the PE ACM cladding.
I thought, gosh, everyone is blaming each other.
The external fire was driven to an overwhelming extent by Arconic's polyethylene-cored Raynabond ACM cladding panels.
If all these people are right, then no one was to blame.
And that's the problem.
The conduct of Celatex and Kingspan in assuring the market that their products could be used at height was the critical causative failure in the case of the Grenfell fire.
I would not put all of the blame on any one company or any one individual.
It's a systemic problem.
Why wasn't there one person who stood up and said, we don't do this?
This is not who we are.
I think the inquiry revealed that public safety was not as interesting as the individual pursuit of private profit.
My question was, is it right that the TMO was looking for the cheapest cladding it could get in order to reduce the overall budget?
We weren't looking for the cheapest, we were looking for something that would achieve planning permission.
It's certainly true that the relationship between the residents of Grenfell Tower and the TMO was not a good one.
This is a report of an investigation report on long-standing complaints of the Kensington and Chelsea TMO.
There are a number of tenants, leaseholders and freeholders who feel aggrieved that their problems have not been resolved by the TMO despite several years of complaining.
Is this a document that you've ever seen before?
I don't remember it being sent to me, and if it was sent to me, I don't remember reading it in any detail.
You could see an inability to read the situation, a kind of numbness, a blindness evolved.
I want to ask you about a complaint now by Mr. Tufan about fire safety.
We wrote this blog in November 2016, KCTMO playing with fire.
It is a truly terrifying thought, but the Grenfell Action Group firmly believe that only a catastrophic event that results in serious loss of life will shine a light on the practices that characterize this malign governance of this non-functioning organization.
Yeah, and we wrote that six months before the fire.
And your response is on page one.
I think Mr. Defond's blog is scaremongering and could be quite frightening to residents.
We found out that our blog, the Grenfell Action Group blog, was being blocked on both the council and the KCTMO's servers so that staff couldn't see what we were writing.
I did ask the head of IT to remove the blog because I felt it was unhelpful.
But the members of the community, they were just people to be managed, rather than individuals with homes.
And I can well imagine that many of them must just have thought, what was the point?
What was it all for?
When the inquiry first started, I'd been very frustrated personally by the government's refusal to answer any real questions about this.
The inquiry called Brian Martin.
He was the civil servant responsible for fire safety for almost 20 years before Grenfell.
I put the following to him.
If it happened in the middle of the night, then the death toll was likely to be 10 to 12 times the six people who died in the Lacknell house fire.
Brian Martin's reply to me was, where's the evidence?
Show me the bodies.
Did you say to him, where's the evidence?
Show me the bodies.
I wouldn't have said that.
Brian Martin could have taken a more decisive stance on fire safety, especially after the Lackanar House fire.
But he perhaps took a more passive approach.
The private comment that you only have a duty to respond to the coroner, not kiss her backside, discloses your attitude to the coroner's recommendations, which would not tend to indicate that they were being taken very seriously.
I agree.
Clearly, it's an informal comment.
We tried and we couldn't effect change quicker.
For me, personally, feeling like I couldn't do enough beforehand to prevent such a tragedy, yeah, it's something that I've been living with.
They didn't want to listen at the time.
Over the last few months, I've been looking through the evidence.
It became clear to me that there were a number of occasions
where I could have potentially prevented this happening.
As a result of that, I ended up being the single point of failure in the department.
That's why I think we failed to stop this happening.
For that's something I'm bitterly sorry.
Do you agree with Brian Martin calling himself the single point of failure?
Hmm, interesting.
Not necessarily.
Are there others to blame, from my perspective?
Eric Pickles was Secretary of State responsible for fire safety before Grenfell.
I think it's important for everybody who's giving evidence in a public inquiry to realize that the purpose is to get to the truth.
And in giving evidence, I think people also need to recognize that, at the end of the day, this inquiry is being held because people died.
Feel free to ask me as many questions as you like, but could I respectfully remind you that you did promise that we will be away this morning, and I have changed my schedules to fit this in.
I do have an extremely busy day meeting people, but this is more important than anything, but I would urge you to use your time wisely.
Right.
Lord Pickles was repeatedly asked about the Conservative Party's drive to deregulate and get rid of health and safety rules in the years before Grenfell.
The government at the time, before I became Prime Minister, was very keen on ensuring that they, as far as possible, they were reducing the number of regulations.
I think what we see from the inquiry was that too many people just weren't looking at those regulations, perhaps with a sense of recognizing the importance of them in terms of keeping people safe.
In fact, your department was always subject to the deregulatory agenda, which led to a complete absence of proper checks and balances so far as concerns life safety.
Again, I think that would be unkind.
And I have to say, you know, without getting too emotional, I swore on the bloody Bible.
I swore on the Bible.
I'm a Christian.
And what happened in Grenfell is there was regulation there, but sadly it wasn't up to the purpose.
It wasn't able to do its job because companies were able to find a way around it.
But we should never lose sight, this is not about deregulation, one in, one out.
Ultimately, it comes down to the nameless, I think it was 96 people who were killed in the Grenville fire.
It's the thing we should think about.
As everybody knows, 72 residents of Grenfell Tower died.
96 was the number of victims of the Hillsborough disaster.
That number 72 should sit with everybody if it's important to you.
If it's not important to you, then, yeah, sure, it's something you'll forget.
You'll just mix it up with another disaster where a lot of working-class people died.
Each and every one had a life and an expectation of life.
This was a fire which had come into their homes from outside.
And that, to me, was an intrusion of universal horror.
I think there are a number of things that we all need to learn.
One of the key issues for me was this question of a country that felt that there were a group of people whose very housing that they were living in meant that they were in some sense second-class to others.
And we've seen that time and time again.
Authorities have treated people like second-class citizens.
And I hope that coming out of the Grenfell tragedy, we can erase that sense
312 days and 300,000 documents later, the inquiry is over.
The chairman's report will give recommendations.
For now, though, all families can do is wait.
There started to be small gatherings of the community on the 14th of every month outside the tower.
And then it went to one march every year on the anniversary.
that says we're still here, we're still waiting for justice.
I started looking at social media.
I noticed a message from... The realization was that I was looking for their niece.
I think it slowly became apparent that instead of going down, she had gone up to escape the smoke.
And she'd gone to the top of the tower and died on the 23rd floor.
My whole world just fell apart.
He laid the women and children on the bed.
And he would have been the last to have died.
And his body was found at the foot of the bed, where he was sitting on the floor.
And so we know, and that's why we say he was a comforter.
He was a decent human being.
He would have looked after them to the end.
I think about them a lot.
You actually found out about the people we lost and we couldn't save.
Never done that before.
And now it was hard.
He was left with no options just to try to escape from the window.
He tried to use the sheets that were tied together.
However, I don't think he made it all the way down, so he did fall from the window.
If you try to jump from the window, it means you lost hope.
I'm very angry with everyone who was responsible for his death.
After the fire, we were taken to King's College Hospital, the mother's side.
And I said, yeah, I understand.
That's what you need to do.
That's when he said, Logan passed away.
72 people died.
18 of them were children, including my son, who was the youngest victim.
They were all robbed of whatever they could have become.
Once upon a time, there was a boy on a boat.
He lived happily ever after.
You feel guilty in a way.
I feel guilty that I'm here living, doing my life.
And they're not.
Seven years after the Grenfell Tower fire, the final report into what caused the disaster is due to be published.
The inquiry has no power to punish or compensate.
There's likely to be separate criminal trials to do that.
We're just about to hear from the chair.
Not all of them bear the same degree of responsibility, but all contributed to it in one way or another, in most cases through incompetence, but in some cases through dishonesty and greed.
A damning final report into the Grenfell disaster.
A catalogue of negligence so complete that it's almost unimaginable.
And it's that word, avoidable, that really strikes you.
What families want is criminal prosecutions, but they've been told that's not going to happen for years.
their lives are on hold while those responsible walk free.
The inquiry made 58 recommendations, top of the list a change to building regulations.
I'd now like to introduce
Pete Apps, a journalist who has supported the fight and call for justice in this community ever since the fire seven years ago today.
Please give him a warm welcome.
Like many of the people here, I have been coming to these silent walks for seven years.
But today I want to give you another list of names.
They are the names many want us to forget, but we will not.
So remember RBKC.
Remember the long fire day.
To be honest, I'm sure this could happen again.
But we still don't know who's the people who's going to be in prison.
So it's just kind of making me lost now.
KCTMO.
So much time has passed and so little has changed.
That's what Grenfell's about.
It's a story of heartbreaking, unbelievable cruelty to citizens in a country where I'm sure we don't think we behave that way.
Remember Kingspan?
Remember Celotex?
Until human life means more than profit, things are never going to change.
There are thousands of buildings that still have the combustible cladding on those buildings.
Remember our product.
organizations are held to account for the death of my brother and the other 71 victims.
We will keep your names in our minds and on our lips until we see justice for the 72 names we hold in our hearts.
Thank you very much.
We just want justice, you know?
I don't think there's too much to ask.
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Hey.