A firefighter who tried to rescue a 12-year-old girl from a 20th floor flat in Grenfell Tower has told the inquiry he raced up the smoke-filled stairs but found her home deserted.

David Badillo, who has served at North Kensington fire station for 20 years, said he and colleagues searched as flames flared around the outside of the building.

In a statement, he said he met a teenager coming into the building who was distressed because her younger sister, Jessica Urbano, was alone in flat 176 on the 20th floor.

“I told her not to worry and that I would go and get Jessica on my own as I didn’t want to endanger her. She then gave me the keys. I decided that the quickest way to go and get Jessica would be to get in the lift.”

He pressed the button to floor 20. “It seemed to take forever and I felt very alone, but the lift opened on the 15th floor, which surprised me.” Thick, black smoke appeared. He was not wearing breathing apparatus and was forced to retreat downstairs.

As he left the tower to collect breathing apparatus, he looked up. He saw flames three-quarters of the way up the building. “I was in complete shock … The noise was similar to fireworks – the fire was fizzing like sparklers and the fire was going sideways. It looked as though someone had poured petrol down the side, which had caught fire. It looked as though the fire was catching from the cladding.”

People had expressions of panic, he said. He collected the apparatus and recruited colleagues to help him. Badillo said he had a “bit of an adrenaline rush” and reached the 20th floor first. “I had been carrying kit but didn’t find it too difficult as I had the little girl on my mind.”

The flat door was slightly ajar, he recalled. Inside it was hot and full of smoke. “I could see an orange curtain of flames at the window but they appeared to still be on the outside. It was very strange…” The firefighters searched all the rooms but could not find Jessica.

His colleague’s oxygen supply warning sounded so they had to retreat downstairs. “It was a bit scary being surrounded by flames and smoke without any comms – it felt like we were trapped.”

As they descended they were affected by heat stress. “It makes you angry … It took me back to training school … we were being pushed to our limit.”

They made it down eventually. “I remember looking up at the tower and thinking that we weren’t going to stop the fire and lots of people were going to be killed,” Badillo said.

“By now, the fire had reached the top. It looked as though the building was falling apart … At one point a piece hit our engine and the engine next to us caught on fire before it was put out.”

David Badillo (front) followed by watch manager Michael Dowden, enters Grenfell Tower on the night of the fire.

He succeeded in resuscitating a woman who had been brought down. “Her mouth was blackened. I continued to pump air into her body and her arm suddenly started to raise and the lady came to. She started to say ‘thank you, thank you’ repeatedly and appeared to be grateful to be alive and tried to hug me.”

At one stage “spotters” were deployed to tell those leaving the tower under the protection of riot shields when it was safe to avoid falling debris.

Much later that afternoon, Badillo said, he joined a vigil for Jessica. “The family weren’t getting much official information, I was their point of contact. It was later discovered she had died. Jessica had left her flat and gone up to the 23rd floor, with a group of people.

“In the following month I cried every day and talking about what happened was very upsetting. I started to realise that I needed to do something to help the community. Since then I have been helping to raise money for the survivors and bereaved.”Badillo said he had run up the stairs to the 20th floor “at a jog”; the smoke became thicker the higher he rose.



Inside the flat, he said, “we were shouting out and searching by stamping and sweeping to feel our way round, using our torches.We were sure that we had completed a thorough search and that no one was inside the flat.”

At one stage Badillo broke down in tears as he was questioned by Richard Millett QC, counsel to the inquiry, about his efforts to rescue Jessica. The firefighter was asked whether he had been told that she had by that stage climbed up to the 23rd floor and that she had been on the phone to the emergency services. He answered ‘No’ to both.



“If you were told that Jessica was in Flat 201 [on the 23rd floor] what would you have done?” Millett asked. Badillo replied: “I would have gone up to flat 201”.

Asked whether he had knocked on the neighbouring door of Flat 175, where the Belkadi family perished, he said: “No. I didn’t know there was anyone in there.” He said he had been looking for a young girl.





In his statement, Badillo added: “It was like being in a war film— things were exploding overhead and landing on our shields and craters were appearing in the ground from all of the falling debris. Shards of metal were falling down, as well as concrete and glass and there were fireballs coming down all over the place.”



Radio communications did not work on the night of the fire, he said. “They completely failed. Firefighters rely on communications to do their job properly.”