Child, 8, Family’s Sole Survivor, Watched Father Die in Stampede

Eight-year-old Martin Hartley not only saw his father trampled to death in the panic after a British ferry capsized off the Belgian coast, he also lost his mother and grandparents.

Martin returned home Sunday night with social worker John Robson and his 21-year-old stepbrother, Lance Hartley, who plans to raise him.

Robson said that Martin suffered cuts and bruises all over his body from flying glass in Friday’s disaster and that a flying table had caused a serious leg injury.

“After the table hit him he called for help and his father shouted back. That’s when Martin witnessed his father being trampled on and pushed under the water,” Robson said. “There was a mad, desperate scramble by everybody on board to get out.”

Martin also was pushed under the water but surfaced and was plucked to safety, he said.

Officials said Monday that the list of passengers on the Herald of Free Enterprise who were killed or are missing and believed dead includes the boy’s parents, Dick and Hazel Hartley; grandparents, Elsie and Joe Hartley, and Pat Hawley, a family friend he called his aunt.

Martin cried when he volunteered information to his relatives about his experience. “He is obviously still shocked and naturally is reliving the horror of his experience,” Robson said.

On the flight home from Belgium, Robson said, Martin feared the plane would crash and was comforted by a man sitting nearby. The man had lost two children of his own in the disaster.

Martin’s large family and residents of the tightly knit former mining town of Cotmanhay, near Ilkeston in central England, say they will give him all the support they can.

Classmates at Cotmanhay Junior School prayed Monday that Martin would eventually get over his “nightmare experience.”

The principal excused about 60 students from the prayer service so they could attend their regular swimming lessons, saying he believes similar lessons almost certainly had helped to save Martin.