The devastated mother of a law graduate who plunged 40ft to her death from a bridge while desperately seeking help after her car caught fire today said her daughter pleaded with rescuers: ‘Please don’t let me die’.
Azra Kemal, 24, slipped through a 10ft wide void between two carriageways on a road bridge while escaping a burning car on the A21 on Thursday.
She climbed over the barriers in the dark thinking that there was a central reservation between the carriageways before falling to her death.
Fighting back tears, Azra’s mother Nevres Kemal, 56, today revealed that her home in north London felt empty without her only child.
Speaking in Whetstone, the social worker – who exposed failings in child care in Haringey before Baby P died in 2007 – said: ‘There is no life in the home.
‘She was really and truly the air that I breathe. That is all I live for, for her. I am in total shock. I do not know what to say.
‘On Thursday morning at about 10am two police officers came to the door and I knew, and they said her name, I said her name, and they told me of her demise.
‘She was driving along the A21 with friends in the car. They were swapping drivers. She rang about 2.30am to tell me something, that she was coming back.
‘I came downstairs and I knew she was not coming home and I could not ring her back. There was a fault with the car and it started to smoke.
‘They got out of the car and moved away from the car. Then it exploded. They were trying to wave people down and also they crossed the central reservation.
‘She climbed up and there was no concrete. This reservation was not there. It was pitch black so she has fallen 40 feet to the earth.
‘She was still alive. The guy jumped down and could not see her.
‘She said ‘Don’t leave me here’. Fortunately an off-duty nurse was passing and saw the car and she called the paramedics. The accident happened at 2.34am and she was pronounced dead at 3.20am.
‘Her last words were ‘Please don’t let me die’.’
Ms Kemal, who now runs the charity Raising My Voice Foundation, added: ‘They need to have lights or signs. This was God’s will, as in the car decided to go on fire there.
‘They could have stopped earlier. A car could have stopped and helped.’
The London School of Economics law graduate, who was due to start a law practice course this year, was on her way home from a night out with friends and was in the car with a 31-year-old male friend when the engine burst into flames.
She had called her mother Nevres Kemal just minutes earlier to say she was on her way home from a night out with friends.