Louise James arriving at the inquest in Buncrana.(North West Newspix)
THE Derry woman who lost her mother, partner, sister and two little boys in the Buncrana drowning tragedy has told how she knew something was wrong the moment she got a phonecall alerting her to the tragedy.
Louise James told the inquest into the deaths of five members of her family that she last saw them on Friday, March 18th.
Her partner Sean McGrotty and boys had left her off to a friend’s house at 4pm as she was traveling to Liverpool to attend a friend’s hen party.
She revealed that just minutes before the tragedy, at 6.55pm, she had spoken by phone with her sister Jodi Lee and boys who were playing in a playpark on the shorefront in Buncrana.
A short time later while at the airport on her journey home, she received a phonecall at 7.25pm from her brother Joshua.
“I got feeling something wasn’t right,” she said.
He told her there had been an incident in Buncrana and that a car had gone into the water but he thought it contained two men.
Ms James said she had tried to contact both her partner and her sister but could not reach them.
She took her plane to Belfast and when she arrived she was contacted by family members by phone.
She was informed that her partner Sean, sons, sister and mother had drowned but that baby Rioghnach-Ann had been saved.
She travelled to her home in Derry and then travelled on to Letterkenny University Hospital to see her surviving child and to make the harrowing identification of the rest of her tragic family.
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