Officer who found Daniela Espírito Santo on sofa holding child breaks down as he recalls moment to inquest
A police officer broke into tears today as he remembered discovering the body of a young mother holding her six-month-old child.
The inquest into the death of Daniela, of Chestnut Grove in Grantham, heard how PC Jordan Bathie-Drexler received a call to attend the home of Daniela Espírito Santo at around 11.30pm on April 8, 2020.
He, along with three other officers, was let into the building by a neighbour and made his way to the second-floor flat.
Knocking on the door yielded no response and, listening through the letterbox, PC Bathie-Drexler could only hear the sound of a child crying, but no-one comforting them.
“That rang alarm bells that potentially the occupants inside were in need of help,” he told the jury inquest, before describing how a decision was made to force entry.
He said the rooms along the corridor to the living room space were secured as he went.
“As I walked through the door, there was a window open with a travel cot and a young child sleeping inside. On the left was a television, and on the right was a sofa... with Daniela on it, holding her six-month-old baby,” he said, beginning to cry as he described the scene.
The National Domestic Violence Helpline is a 24hr Freephone available on 0808 2000 247 operating 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
“She had her arm around her son, and I could see she was unconscious,” continued the officer, after a break to recompose himself.
The inquest heard how police officers attempted to resuscitate Daniela through CPR and were eventually joined by paramedics roughly 18 minutes later.
Emergency services attempted to save her, including multiple attempts with a defibrillator and the use of adrenaline and other medications.
However, after she was taken downstairs to be transferred to an ambulance, they noticed that Daniela’s heart had stopped. She was pronounced dead at 12.58am on April 9.
During the sixth day of the inquest today (Tuesday), the jury heard a custody sergeant apologised to the family for an inappropriate “joke” made during the investigation.
The jury was also played audio of Daniela’s 999 call at 11.23pm, where she described how her partner, Julio Jesus, had returned to their property despite being released on bail for an assault earlier that day.
Mr Jesus had breached bail conditions forbidding him from attending the address or contacting Daniela.
Daniela told the operator that he was “gone now” but described how he had been “pushing me out of the way and everything” while she tried to talk to him.
The operator clarified that she did not need an ambulance and told her to call 101.
A statement from call handler Anthony Nunn was read out in court, describing how he had followed the police model to assess the appropriate response to the call for service.
He noted that she had been “upset” when he advised her to call 101 but said many people often had similar reactions.
However, he then said that “within seconds” of putting the phone down, he had decided to look up the address she mentioned and had seen a “critical marker”, denoting that any calls associated with the address needed to be classed as urgent, after which he requested officers attend before moving on to the next incident.
Mr Nunn said that, based on the information he had, he did not “think I could have done anything different”.
“We don’t do address checks for every call because we don’t have time,” he said.
He did, however, suggest that critical markers “should be notified better” and made “clearer”.
His statement told the inquest that he had not received refresher training as a call handler.
No audio of Daniela’s 101 call was played. However, a brief transcript described how the operator had introduced themselves to no response.
Throughout the call, there was the sound of a young baby crying. The operator said “hello” on several occasions, but there was no further response.
Technical expert for G4S, David Dennison, said in a written statement that data showed Daniela could have spent 1 minute 31 seconds waiting for the call to connect, a further six minutes and 48 seconds in the queue before her call was answered, with the operator spending 36 seconds connecting to her.
Daniela’s best friend also gave evidence on Tuesday, describing a phone call earlier that day during which Daniela was “petrified”.
A statement submitted to the inquest described Daniela as the “kindest, most caring person you would ever meet” who “wouldn’t hurt a fly”.
Charley Whitmore (née Price-Wallace) and Daniela had been friends since secondary school.
On April 8, Charley received a call from Daniela at around 3.30pm.
“She was crying, petrified, really distressed,” said Mrs Whitmore.
“It took a while to calm her down so that I could hear what she was saying.”
Daniela told Mrs Whitmore what had happened, including that she had made an official complaint and that Mr Jesus had been arrested.
Mrs Whitmore said Daniela told her that a police officer had said “if he [Mr Jesus] was released, she must let him in to collect his work items”.
An officer on a previous day had denied that this would be the case.
“I said ‘surely not, surely someone would come with him’,” she said.
“She was adamant that that was what she had been told.”
Mrs Whitmore said that normally she would have visited Daniela, but Covid restrictions had just been brought in, so she felt unable to do so.
She said she felt Daniela had rung because she needed reassurance that she could get through things and that she was looking for encouragement and someone to listen to her.
“She told me she was petrified of him killing her,” said Mrs Whitmore.
“My last words were, ‘You need to get out before he kills you’, then she said, ‘Someone’s calling me, I have to go’. That was the last time I spoke to her.”
She told the jury that she felt Daniela’s heart condition was “well managed” and that she had gone to appointments with her in the past to support her.
The jury also heard from a neighbour who heard screaming from the flat on the night of the incident, including a male voice shouting, “Shall I drop it?” and a female shouting, “That’s my baby, get off my baby, put my baby down, please let go of my baby”.
Lianne O’Connor lived two floors below Daniela at the time of the incident and had lived there since August 2019.
On April 8, she had been out in the garden most of the day and came in around 4pm. Her own children went to bed at around 9.30pm.
She said that she heard an argument at about 10.30pm but did not think much of it at first because the sound was so regular.
“There was arguing every other day. I’d been there six months and by this point I was already considering moving because of the constant noise issues,” she said.
She said Mr Jesus was going in and out of the flat at all times.
Other noises she described included how, when anyone was going in or out, the front door would buzz, and people on the stairs could be heard.
After her bath, Ms O’Connor said that, as she was watching TV, the screaming and shouting escalated.
“Normally I would turn up the TV and mind my business, but this time something seemed different,” she said, noting that she had her window open and knew that Daniela also kept her window open.
Suddenly, she said: “There was a very loud scream, different from one I’d heard before; it was more like a squeal.
“I immediately turned the TV off. Something wasn’t right; something was going off this time.
“There was another loud scream, which made me really, really worried. I jumped out of bed.”
She said that she knew the two screams came from the same person, which she “knew was Daniela”.
Ms O’Connor described going into panic mode and beginning to listen to the sounds specifically, following them around the flat.
“I heard lots of shouting: ‘Get out, leave me alone, get out, get out,’” she said.
“He shouted back. I couldn’t make out what he was saying. It might have been a different language.”
She heard footsteps going to the children’s bedroom, which was above hers.
“I heard her shout, ‘That’s my baby, get off my baby, put my baby down, please let go of my baby.’”
Following the footsteps further, she described hearing the bathroom window open.
On questioning by family counsel, she later revealed that when the bathroom window was opened, she heard a male voice say, “Shall I drop it? Shall I drop it?” before adding something about “£20”.
She said the shouting was in a mix of English and what sounded like a foreign language.
Ms O’Connor said she ran to her bedroom to put her phone on charge to call the police, and as she did so, she heard footsteps she assumed were Mr Jesus coming down the stairs and exiting the block of flats via a back entrance rather than the front one.
“I have never heard anything like it. It will be imprinted in my mind forever,” she told the inquest.
Ms O’Connor didn’t get a chance to call the police because two officers tapped on her window, asking to be let in, which she did.
Ms O’Connor told the inquest that, at that point, no house-to-house enquiries had yet been carried out by the police, but said that if officers had asked her to keep an eye on her neighbour, she would have called them much earlier.
Also on the sixth day of the inquest, the jury heard evidence of Children’s Services’ involvement in some of the incidents.
They were also read a statement from Mr Jesus’ estranged sister, who confirmed that she had not spoken to him in a long while and that he had not contacted her to stay with her following his release.
Angela Silveira described being asked by another family member to check if Mr Jesus had been arrested after Daniela contacted the family to let them know.
She added that the family member, another sister, had berated Daniela for calling the police, telling her the couple “should have sorted it out themselves”.
The inquest continues.
