A father used the Life360 app on his phone to locate his 16-year-old daughter after the car she was in left the road and ended up in a water-filled ditch near Sittingbourne. The teen was trapped upside down for three hours as her two friends drowned in front of her.
The girl had been in the car with Adam Dudzinski, 17, and his girlfriend Chloe-Ann Naylor, 16, when the Ford Fiesta being driven by Adam left the road near Iwade, Kent, and entered the ditch. The surviving girl told Kent and Medway coroner's court that she lay trapped for three hours in the submerged car as her friends died.
App leads to rescue
Despite her phone having stopped sending her location, the girl's father used Life360, an app that allows users to share real-time location information with friends and family, to find her most recent coordinates. Just before midnight on January 3, he found the overturned car near Old Ferry Road and called emergency services. A mass response involving paramedics, fire crew, police, and the coast guard followed. Adam and Chloe-Ann were pronounced dead. The surviving girl was taken to hospital and later discharged.
The teens' families had reported them missing, but nobody knew where they were until the surviving girl's father pulled up Life360. She told police that Adam had failed to brake before a sharp bend, causing the Fiesta to career off the road and flip into the ditch. An inquest heard there was no evidence he had been speeding, but he was probably driving too fast for the conditions. He did not have a driving licence and was uninsured.
Heroic acts in the water
As she lay trapped in the back seat, the girl said she had been mentally preparing to drown until Chloe-Ann, trapped in the front seat, reached back and tapped her leg, giving her the courage to release her seatbelt. Chloe-Ann repeatedly attempted to contact emergency services and her mother but could not get through. She tried to keep Adam's head above the water, according to the surviving girl. Adam, who worked for Sainsbury's, repeatedly apologised, saying "I am sorry, I am sorry." The survivor desperately kept trying to call out to her friends, but eventually they both stopped responding.
Adam had been driving the trio to Chloe's home in Sittingbourne after spending time at his house. Officers tried to press charges against his legal guardian for permitting unlicensed and uninsured driving, but the Crown Prosecution Service said there was not enough evidence to pursue this.
Tributes and inquest
In the days following the deaths, floral tributes were left at the scene, and more than £15,000 was raised in two GoFundMe fundraisers for the families. The coroner concluded the inquest by saying he "was so sorry" for the families' loss. Recording accidental death verdicts, he said: "This is a very tragic state of circumstances and I cannot begin to imagine what the three families have been through."
