After the fall

摘要

On 26 September 2006 Liliana Alexa's son, Michael, was changing the wheel of his car in the road outside his house in Battersea, south-west London, when bolts attaching the top of a nearby crane to the mast sheared, sending the cab and jib crashing down on the streets below. According to Liliana, local eyewitnesses report 23-year-old Michael pausing to get children playing outside a local shop out of the way as the crane started to fall. By the time Liliana was at the scene, all she could see was her son's body under the wreckage. "That image will follow me forever," Liliana says, 10 years on. Emergency services took nearly four days to clear away enough of the debris to allow them to remove his remains. The crane's driver Jonathan Cloke was also killed.