Detective Inspector Kelvyn Ashby had just got home after a busy 12-hour shift when he received a call from his detective sergeant.
“It was about 8.45pm, at first it was thought to be one of the routine exercises declared at the airport, but 10 minutes later he rang back to confirm a plane had gone down,” he said.
The 63-year-old, who retired as a detective chief superintendent, rang his then boss, Superintendent Graham Blandford, and they agreed to meet on the bridge over the motorway near the crash scene.
He said: “I wasn’t sure what we would do when we got there, but it soon became apparent there was no plan in place for dealing with bodies from where the plane had crashed.
“There was a plan for crashes at the airport, but not for one outside its perimeter.
“I said, ‘shall we go and find somewhere to use as a mortuary?’.
“We went to the airport and were directed to a barn-type building and opened it up. There were already bodies arriving. Thankfully, it was January and it was freezing.
“By now, it was about midnight. We had no template for this. We called in all detectives on duty. There were about 15 of us. Two officers were assigned to each body.
“We got out chalk used for road accidents to mark out where the bodies would go.”
Officers then painstakingly gathered together all the victims’ belongings and completed personal description forms noting identification marks such as tattoos and birthmarks.
Mr Ashby and his men took little break from their grim task over the next week, determined to return the victims’ bodies to their loved ones as soon as possible.
He said: “Three or four post-mortem examinations at a time were carried out. The priority was to get the bodies away.
“It was not a pleasant experience. Some of the bodies were mutilated, most involved broken bones and multiple internal injuries. Dealing with children was the worst.
“Over three or four days, people got to grips with what had happened. We were offered counselling, but what we did as a group was go to the pub – it was the best debrief we could have had.
“But it was too much for one officer, who left the force on ill health because he never recovered from the experience and was suffering post-traumatic stress disorder.”
Lessons learned at Kegworth were passed on to other forces.
Mr Ashby said: “One of the things which came out of the debriefs was what if this had happened in July? It happened in January when it was freezing, but we had to search for a cold store large enough to deal with a situation like this if, God forbid, it ever happens again.”
Friday 10 January 2014
http://www.leicestermercury.co.uk/Kegworth-air-disaster-Detective-Inspector-Kelvyn/story-20414499-detail/story.html
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