by Divvy »
17 Sep 2012 17:18
Of all the images I have seen of this terrible disaster, this one is the most powerful and heartbreaking for me.
One the right hand side, the man (?) with his back to the fence. He will have been staring at the person(s) who couldn't avoid suffocating him. Then the poor woman to hos left, who's head is forced upwards, and the fence can be seen cutting in to her throat against her apple. It's almost certain she was gone at this point. Also the woman to the left who looks like she too had died at this point. But what strikes me about this picture is just how different things appear just a couple of feet to the left. The young lad looks like he doesn't have a care in the world. It's as if he doesn't realise how bad things are to his side. Perhaps he was one of the lucky ones at the front that came away with his life on that dreadful day.
One of the witness statements I read was a young man who was in the crush, and his arm must have been forced up and his forearm ended up thrust against someone's throat. The man was blue, and managed to say "you're killing me". Seconds later that man had gone. He slowly slipped under everyone's feet.
I find reading/listening to the witness accounts of that day so difficult. I've tried explaining it to my children, even talking about it to my wife, but there's always a lump in the throat and at the least glassy eyes when doing so. At the end of the day, these people were football fans just like you and me. We all have our rivals, but we're all connected by our passion for the game, and our clubs. In many ways we're one family, and the loss of these 96 lives is a sad loss to us all.
