Mother tells of Danielle’s last moments

THE mother of Danielle Beccan, the English schoolgirl killed yards from her home in a drive-by shooting, told yesterday how she cradled her dying daughter just minutes after the apparently motiveless attack.

Paula Platt rushed to her daughter as she lay in the street in the St Ann’s area of Nottingham, another victim of the city’s gun crime epidemic. Mrs Platt spoke of her last words to 14-year-old Danielle: “I love you. Come back to us, I will be waiting for you.”

“I love you too mum,” replied Danielle shortly before she died in hospital of a single gunshot wound to the chest.

Mrs Platt, 32, said she had been left feeling “numb” by her daughter’s death. Danielle was shot as she walked home from the city’s historic Goose Fair in the early hours of Saturday morning.

“I am crying inside. My heart is in two, three, four pieces. It’s in bits,” she said.

“There are no words that can describe how I feel.”

Mrs Platt was called out from her home in the early hours of Saturday morning by friends of Danielle who were with her when she was shot. “She was lying on the floor. I could see a bullet hole in her top. I knelt down beside her and she kept closing her eyes.

“She said she felt like she was dying. I said just stay awake, stay awake.”

“You don’t let your kids out thinking they will get shot. You never ever think it will be you.”

“I’ve got a nine-year-old son asking if he is going to die as well,” she said.

The grieving mother lashed out her daughter’s killers. “They are wicked, evil scum. Human beings do not behave like that,” she said.

“I bet they are still sleeping, walking, talking, laughing, breathing. My child is doing none of those things.