A woman who was amongst those who stood closest to the Manchester Arena bomber when he detonated the device says she was left feeling ‘abandoned and left to die’ as ‘an eternity’ passed without emergency services coming to their aid.
Janet Senior, of West Yorkshire, had been waiting in the foyer at the end of the Ariana Grande concert with her sister Josie Howarth – stood around 15 feet away from Salman Abedi as they waited for their nieces Jenny, 19 and Jodie, 13.
The girls, who had been sitting on the opposite side of the arena from where the attack happened, escaped unharmed.
And by some miracle, Janet and Josie both survived too.
This was despite Josie being left with two nuts lodged in her leg and Janet having a large metal nut embedded in her neck after completely shattering her clavicle, with another burning and branding its shape on her arm.
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‘Experience will haunt me forever’
Almost five-and-a-half-years on and the sisters have poured over evidence presented to a long-running Public Inquiry, which has examined the security prior to and in and around the event, and the emergency response provided to the hundreds of people left in desperate need.
Janet says she will never forget the feeling of being left badly injured, feeling her sister would die, and seeing others losing their lives, as emergency services delayed entering the building.
We were injured in the foyer for about an hour with no help coming at all, and that time will forever haunt me.
Josie was slipping in and out of consciousness and I was worried she was going to die. I felt so alone, so helpless, so afraid. We were left waiting for what seemed an eternity.
People were dying around us. I can still hear the sounds of all the people around wailing in agony and calling desperately for help. Over time, that calling out faded and people stopped calling out.
I can remember thinking, as more time passed, ‘nobody is coming for us. We’re being left to die.
Over three hours to be taken to hospital
With Josie losing so much blood, the pair managed to use a handbag strap as a make-do tourniquet to stem the flow, but she was too badly injured to try and make her way out of the arena.
Lots of people ran past us and got out, and I don’t blame them at all for that.
I still had the use of my legs, so could have left, but I didn’t have strength in my arms, and wouldn’t have been able to drag Josie out, so I remember thinking I had to choose between seeing my family again and leaving my sister, potentially to die alone.
I stayed and held her hand, but I remember thinking that we’d never get home.
Help for Janet and Josie did eventually arrive, but not from the emergency crews, but from others who had been inside the Arena when the explosion happened. She said:
I can remember a man from British Transport Police and a few others helping us to our feet and putting their arms around us to help us down to the clearing station next to the war memorial entrance, where people injured were just being left in rows.
The emergency crews were outside but there was no organisation as to how people were helped. It was organised chaos and those running things were like rabbits in the headlights.
I’d spent an hour on the cold marble floor in the foyer, then was left for another hour sat on a plastic chair right next to the open entrance of the war memorial in the train station. Josie was laid on the cold floor behind me waiting to be put in an ambulance.
Then the ambulance I was in got lost leaving the arena, so it was another hour before I reached Wythenshawe Hospital, and Josie remained on the floor for a further hour before she got to Bolton Hospital, some three-and-a-half hours after the explosion.
I believe many peoples’ conditions deteriorated because of delays in treatment and getting to hospital. When we were in the clearing area, we were both assessed and labelled as ‘category two injured’, but by the time we given a better assessment from a paramedic team we were up graded to priority ones.
‘Too many chiefs, not enough doers’
The reaction of the emergency services that night has been the subject of the latest Public Inquiry findings published by Chairman Sir John Saunders. Janet herself has a quite straightforward summary of what went wrong. She said:
Too many chiefs, not enough doers.
There were some exceptionally brave people who were inside when it happened and who acted like true heroes. These were mainly ordinary people acting on human instinct to help others. Joe Public did their job but the emergency services had too many chiefs running organised chaos.
I can understand the reluctance to put people in danger and I guess its human nature not to, but I fully believe it was the duty of those emergency and rescue services to go in and to try and save lives.
If you are in the emergency services there is an expectation on you that you are willing to risk your life to protect and save others in danger. I believe they were legally bound to come in and should have been in.
I know there has been a lot of dispute about how many more lives could have been saved, and medical experts have given opinions based on the injuries people had suffered, but there are always exceptions to the rule.
Somebody was looking down on me that night as I had a metal nut go straight into my neck, and my surgeon said he couldn’t believe that I was still alive. The metal nut by some miracle didn’t cause fatal damage, and the heat from it reduced my blood loss.
I am certain that had emergency care come earlier, more could have survived.
Representation at Inquiry came only after legal support
In the months that followed the attack, Janet says she became angered by the narrative which was played out in the media, with police accounts of what happened that night not matching what she, and so many others, had endured.
Frustration continued as survivors were initially denied Core Participant status at the Public Inquiry, and Janet says it was only when she was introduced to the Hudgell Solicitors Civil Liberties team, who now represent a group of 150 injured survivors and the families of Sorrell Leczkowski, 14, and Philip Tron, 32, who were killed, that she felt properly listened to.
As survivors we were initially told by the police that we were mistaken as to what we remembered, but we knew people had been left without help.
I was getting really frustrated but then I met another survivor, Martin Hibbert, who was saying the same as me and was being ignored too. He introduced me to Hudgell Solicitors, and in them we found people who wanted to listen to us and wanted to get to the truth.
Thankfully we were eventually granted a voice at the inquiry as witnesses, and that was so important to us.
The people who died have not been able to speak. Those of us there have wanted to speak for them. We know what happened and that is why it has been so important to me that the truth comes out.
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‘Our lives changed forever’
For now and into the future, Janet, 64, and Josie, 66, like so many others, have had to adapt to very different lives.
We were very driven people, who each ran our own businesses which we loved and would have continued to do so for many years, but we’ve not been able to since this happened.
Physically we both struggle with our permanent injuries, and we’ve both been diagnosed with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).
I always thought I could shake off trauma and move on but I really don’t think we ever will. Our lives changed forever that night. And living with PTSD is extremely hard. We move on the best we can, but we’ll never be the same.
