Grenfell survivor Marcio Gomes: 'I can't change what happened – but speaking out could save somebody else's family'

That all changed in the small hours of 14 June 2017, when a fire broke out on the fourth floor of the west London tower block and Marcio became the father of the youngest victim of the blaze that killed 72 people, 18 of them children.

With no one yet brought to book over a tragedy that has become a byword for regulatory failure and corporate greed, Marcio is among those sharing his story in the Netflix documentary Grenfell: Uncovered. His decision to speak is in part fuelled by his anger at that lack of accountability. “Manufacturers and organisations let Grenfell happen,” Marcio says. “This was an avoidable tragedy, and people need to be held accountable. It’s important to keep this in the news in whatever way we can.”

Marcio and Andreia moved into Grenfell with their then infant daughters in April 2007. “I was there for ten years, but most people were there for 20 or 30,” he says.

On the night their lives changed for ever, Luana and Megan were 12 and ten years old, and Andreia was seven months pregnant with their third child, a boy. The excited family had already named him Logan.

They had been out for dinner and were asleep when Marcio was awakened in the small hours by a neighbour banging on the door to say there was a fire in one of the flats below. Looking out of the window and seeing only the lights of the fire engines on the scene, he assumed that everything was contained. “I didn’t feel in danger at all,” he says.

That feeling didn’t last long. Marcio made increasingly frantic calls to the fire service and was told help was coming for him. “I remember opening the front door of the flat, but the smoke was extremely thick and black,” he says.

More than two hours after the fire started, and with flames now raging at his windows, Marcio decided to evacuate his terrified family from the burning tower. “We left on our own just after 3am.”

In the barely imaginable chaos that followed, he endeavoured to lead his heavily pregnant wife and two children down 21 flights of stairs to safety in near-pitch black and acrid smoke, but they were separated from each other on the way down. In the documentary, Luana, who also shares her story, weeps as she recalls stepping over bodies on the way.

Luana collapsed on the stairs and had to be rescued by a fireman. Such was the damage to her lungs from the smoke and toxic fumes that, alongside her mother and Megan, she had to be placed in an induced coma for several days.

Tragically, Logan was among those who didn’t survive. The baby was delivered stillborn by C-section while Andreia was still in a coma. “I had to break the news to her,” Marcio says, his voice choked with emotion.

Their desperate grief – and their different ways of dealing with it – was one of the contributing factors to the couple’s divorce three years later. “It’s still never easy to talk about,” he says now.

When Marcio’s family did leave hospital, it was to the uncertainty of temporary accommodation, first in a hotel, then an Airbnb. It took ten months for the family to find a new permanent home, although following his 2021 divorce Marcio now lives with his mother.

Along with the rest of his family, Marcio has had to undergo extensive therapy to try to come to terms with what they went through. “One of the conclusions that we’ve come to is that I’m a different person now, and I need to accept that,” he says. “I’m definitely Marcio number two, if you like. My personality changed, my confidence in myself and authorities has changed, and I cannot go back to who I was.’’

Survivor’s guilt, meanwhile, remains an ongoing battle. “Why did we make it out when others didn’t?” he asks. “That includes my neighbours, right next door.”

All this for a family who, like nearly everyone else in Grenfell that night, were “just people sleeping”, as the documentary’s director Olaide Sadiq puts it. “One of our contributors said that to me off screen and it stayed with me for months. Because that can be any one of us,” she says. “I hope people leave the film with a deeper understanding of what really happened.”

With so many buildings still covered in the cladding that was attached to Grenfell, it’s a sentiment echoed by Marcio.

“I can’t change what happened on that night to my family or anybody’s families,” he says. “But I’m hoping that speaking out could save somebody else’s family. Up and down the country, you still have hundreds, maybe thousands of buildings with similar problems.”

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Grenfell: Uncovered is streaming now on Netflix. Sign up for Netflix from £5.99 a month. Netflix is also available on Sky Glass and Virgin Media Stream.

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