The Manchester Arena terror attack occurred two months ago, sadly the trauma is still very fresh for so many families. The devastated father of 8-year-old Saffie Roussos has told of his wife’s heartbreaking first words when she woke from coma weeks after the Manchester terror attack.
Saffie Roussons was the youngest of the 22 victims killed when a suicide bomber detonated an IED at Ariana Grande’s concert.
Before she died, she lay at the scene in her blood calling for her mum. The 48-year-old mum, Lisa Roussons, couldn’t be there for
her child because she was critically injured in the blast. She was later placed in an induced coma. When she eventually came off life support, the first thing she said to
her husband was, “Saffie’s gone, isn’t she?”
Andrew Roussons, 43, simply nodded in response.
The grieving father spoke to the BBC’s Victoria Derbyshire programme about his
family’s loss for the first time. He said she had been attending the Ariana Grande concert at the arena with Lisa and older sister Ashlee Bromwich on the night of the
explosion. He referred to her as an
“Adorable” child.
Today would have been Saffie’s ninth birthday. Andrew told of how he arrived at the scene of the attack and found Ashlee, who is in her twenties, being treated at the
scene after suffering shrapnel injuries. He later heard his wife had been taken to Salford Royal Hospital. It wasn’t until hours
later that he was given the devastating news by a detective that Saffie had been killed.
“I couldn’t take it in. I just sat there looking at him. It’s just your worst nightmare. I didn’t know what to say, I didn’t know what to think,” he recalled.
Andrew said during the interview that his “stunning” young daughter loved stardom
and would have wanted her beautiful face to be remembered by people across the country.
“She was just everything you could wish for in a little girl,” he told the programme.
He added that his family does “a little bit of laughing”, “a little bit of joking” and “a little
bit of crying and cuddling”, which is how they “get through the day”.
