Grenfell fire and a London-Irish family’s loss: ‘I said are you okay? He replied: No sis, I’m not’

On Tuesday, the night before the release of the final report on the Grenfell fire, people gathered to read tributes on the memorial wall near where the gutted tower block still stands in west London.
High on the wall and illuminated in the soft glow of the memorial’s lights was a plaque: “Denis Murphy, Flat 111, 14th Floor, Grenfell Tower W11.” He was 56 when he died.
His mother, Anne, had moved from Limerick to London in the 1950s. Denis, a painter and decorator, was the eldest of four. He loved his Irish heritage, and Chelsea football club.
He was divorced from his former wife Tracey, but they remained friends and had a son, Peter.
On the night of the fire, Denis left panicked messages on his brother Tim’s phone saying he was trapped. Tim contacted their sister, Anne, who drove the short distance to Grenfell with Peter and Tracey. It was about 2am. The fire was raging.
Denis’s sister called his mobile and he picked up. “I said ‘are you okay?’,” Anne told the inquiry. “He replied: ‘No sis, I’m not.’”
Anne got upset when she overheard a voice on a policeman’s radio saying they were using the leisure centre as a morgue. She knew then that her brother was in serious danger.
At one stage, she passed the phone to Peter, who spoke briefly to his father. Denis’s pet name for his son was Boysie. “Dad was in a panicky state,” Peter told the inquiry. “I remember him saying: ‘Boysie, Boysie, I’m stuck, I can’t breathe’.”
It took another three days before Denis’s family would find out he had died. Piecing together various accounts, the inquiry’s report found he succumbed to smoke inhalation between 4am and 4.35am on the morning of the fire.
It turned out he was trapped in a neighbour’s flat, number 113, with single mother Zainab Deen (32) and her two-year old son, Jeremiah, who lived across the hall, and another neighbour, Mohammed Alhajali (23), a Syrian refugee. The four had been told to shelter in the flat by a firefighter. In the chaos they got left behind, and they all died.
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As she suffocated, Zainab called her best friend, Francis Dean, who she had seen only hours before. He raced to the scene but met a police cordon. As he listened to his friend choking, Francis handed the phone to a firefighter, unable to take it any more.
As the firefighter spoke to Zainab, she told him that her son had just died in her arms. The firefighter handed the phone back to Francis. “Tell her you love her,” said the firefighter. Francis took the phone and listened as his friend passed away.
On Wednesday, two hours after the report was released, Francis was part of a group called Grenfell Next of Kin, representing about 34 victims’ loved ones, almost all of ethnic minorities, who held a press conference in a west London hotel to hammer home the message that the inquiry was not enough.
This particular group wants criminal prosecutions, preferably manslaughter. They are angry that the seven-year inquiry has delayed the criminal investigation.
“Ever since that night, I’m messed up,” said Francis. “I lost my job, I’m unemployed now.”
Hisam Choucair (46) lost his mother, sister, her three young daughters and their father in Grenfell. He watched from below as the fire engulfed the block.
“To some, the inquiry has given answers. For others, it just puts an extra nail in the coffin, or in the heart,” he said. “Words cannot describe the pain I have felt. The inquiry has delayed the justice that my family demands.”