She was tidying up: A 39-year-old mother dies of asphyxiation under the weight of her box bed

“There are no words to describe how we feel.” Deeply affected by this loss, Elizabeth, 19, and her brother George, 11, expressed their grief on social media after the death of their mother.

A tragic domestic accident claimed the life of Helen Davey, a 39-year-old British beautician, on June 7 in Seaham, County Durham in the north of England.

The mother suffered a malfunction in her storage bed while she was tidying up. The furniture’s faulty mechanism suddenly closed on her, trapping her at the neck.

Unfortunately, the weight of the bed caused his suffocation, as findings of the investigation released this week revealed. It was Elizabeth, the victim’s daughter, who made the macabre discovery.

The bed pistons were failing

“Her legs were bent as if she was trying to get up,” she testified during the investigation, reports The Guardian, specifying that the pistons of her mother’s bed had been malfunctioning for some time. “I dropped everything I was holding and tried to lift the top of the bed off his head […] It was so heavy for me to lift it and try to get it out […] I noticed her face was blue and she had a clear cut on her neck from the frame. I managed to free it […] I started CPR and noticed she wasn’t breathing.”

Despite the rapid intervention of emergency services, Helen Davey could not be saved.

After this tragedy, the coroner (forensic doctor) who was responsible for determining the causes of his death decided to alert the authorities. He wrote to the relevant ministers about the need to take preventive measures regarding the control of the gas piston mechanisms on this type of beds, in order to prevent such accidents from happening again.