27:12
- ABC News
- July 13, 2017
Escape haunts tower fire survivors a month later
Four people made it out of Grenfell Tower apartment 113 alive. Four didn't.
27:12
“One of the Syrian guys, the one that survived. He came up to us, and he goes, ‘Have you seen my brother?’” Oluwaseun hadn’t.
Mahmoud located Omar, and they called Mohammad again. “‘Where did you go? Why did you leave me?’” Mohammad asked Omar, remembers Mahmoud. “We don’t know exactly what happened.”
Mahmoud had one last phone call with Mohammad, who he says told him, “Just tell my mom to forgive me and please tell her I love them, all the family.”
As flames reached the windows of apartment 113, Mahmoud says, he thought to himself, “Mohammed, he’s not alive. He passed away.”
Sitting in a garden with the charred tower overhead, Mahmoud says, “We saw a lot of things in our life.”
Mahmoud escaped Syria a couple of years ago, making his way to Libya and surviving a journey across the Mediterranean Sea in a small wooden boat to Italy. He flew to the United Kingdom last year to build a new life with his two childhood friends. And it was finally going well, he says. He had just started a job at a local bakery.
“I lost a lot of things from Syria ... everything I had. I lost many times ... Every time we’re losing,” Mahmoud says. “What we can do? We try to live again.”
In recent days, Mahmoud has signed a new yearlong lease, but Oluwaseun, Rosemary and their daughter, like many survivors, are still staying in a hotel room, four weeks later, despite the promises of British politicians.
“We’re not charity cases. I worked hard. We worked hard,” Oluwaseun says.
He’s a site supervisor, and Rosemary is a science teacher.
“We didn’t ask for this. We lived our life like everybody else — wake up, go to work, come back, wake up, go to work, come back.”
Since the fire, Oluwaseun has been afraid of the dark and can’t sleep.
“It keeps playing in my head,” he says, his dark skin going pallid. “I could’ve saved the little boy. Even if I couldn’t do nothing about the adults, could’ve saved the little boy. That just keep playing in my head ... For what reason? Why? Why?”
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