The grieving mother of a ‘beautiful’ young lady discovered dead at Liverpool’s historic Adelphi Hotel has claimed that she was crushed by a wardrobe after mistaking it for the toilet door when she awoke in the middle of the night.
Chloe Haynes, 21, was discovered dead at the famed city-center hotel at 6:37 a.m. on September 10 after emergency personnel responded to a ‘concern for safety’ and went to the scene.
Her mother, Nicola Williams, 49, claims that the wardrobe toppled off the wall and crushed her windpipe after she awoke after a late night out “confused.”
Miss Williams, from Wrexham in North Wales said, ‘Chloe left Pwllheli around 7.40pm and they went to the Adelphi, there was some sort of engagement party or something.
‘By midnight, she had been drinking shots and so on and she was a bit drunk, so her friend has taken her back to the hotel to sleep it off, and then he’s gone back out.
‘It seems she has got up out of the bed confused, not knowing where she is, and she’s opened the door of the wardrobe maybe thinking it is the toilet or the door to go back out of the room.
‘It was a big, old, heavy wardrobe and it’s fallen on her and crushed her windpipe.’
Miss Williams said that Chloe’s friend returned to the room in the early hours of the morning and saw the horrifying scene.
She said that he yelled for assistance, and two men from other rooms arrived to assist in removing the wardrobe off Chloe, but it was too late to save her life.
Speaking about her loss, Miss Williams said: ‘She loved animals, she had a little dog called Archie she was obsessed with. There are so many photos of them together.
‘My little nickname for her was birdy. She was so petite and little, and when she ate she was like a little bird. She was quiet, she was somebody who didn’t speak unless it needed saying.
‘But in the last 12 months she was coming out of her shell, she was gaining her confidence and she had a wide circle of friends. She was kind and caring and she seemed to connect with gay men, and that was how she met the friend she went to Liverpool with.’
Miss Williams said her daughter was enjoying her job waitressing in the holiday park, which also provided her accommodation as well, and was ‘living her best life’.
She said: ‘She was planning to do her driving lessons and she had saved up a little bit of money for that, and she wanted to go abroad on holiday with her friends. She was just doing all the things that any 21-year-old would do.
‘She was beautiful, but she had struggled with confidence about herself so she didn’t really know how beautiful she was and that made her beautiful on the inside as well. She was very kind.’
The mother says she is determined to find out how the incident happened and wants to ‘know every detail’.
‘I don’t know how long she was under there before she died, and we have been told somebody heard a noise from the room around 3am but didn’t report it,’ she said.
‘I just cannot believe my daughter is never coming home because of a wardrobe, for the sake of maybe two screws in a wall. Every year I take a picture of all my children on the couch in their Christmas outfits, and now there will be someone missing.’
A spokesman for Liverpool Council said: ‘We can confirm that we are carrying out a health and safety investigation into a death at the Adelphi Hotel on 10 September.’
Britannia Hotels, which operates the Adelphi, has been contacted for comment.
Three men had initially been arrested in connection with her death but were later released without charge.
The men, aged 26, 46 and 49, were arrested when Merseyside Police launched an investigation into the woman’s death but they later deemed that Miss Haynes had died ‘accidentally’.
A file has been passed to the coroner and a pre-inquest review will take place on a date yet to be confirmed.
At the time of the incident, Detective Chief Inspector Lynsay Armbruster, said: ‘We are in the very early stages of the investigation, and are trying to determine the circumstances around the young woman’s death.
‘I would appeal to anyone who was in the hotel in the early hours of this morning who may have seen, or heard anything, at all to come forward.’
As tributes for the 21-year-old poured in, one friend said: ‘Rest easy beautiful girl.’
Another added: ‘Absolutely heartbroken.’
And a third said: ‘RIP beautiful.’
The hotel gained national recognition after appearing in Hotel, a 1997 fly-on-the-wall documentary series that allowed viewers an unique insight inside the venue’s day-to-day operations.
Andrew Sachs narrated the famous BBC series, which reached 11 million viewers following the premiere of the first episode.
In the early 20th century, rich guests who crossed the Atlantic on ocean liners such as the Titanic flocked to the hotel.
In the late 1940s, Winston Churchill, a former British prime minister, held strategy sessions at the hotel because he enjoyed it so much.
Another past Prime Minister who went through the doors was Harold Wilson, whose favoured suite was named after him.
The city-center hotel, which barely escaped bombing during the May 1941 Liverpool Blitz, drew celebrities such as Frank Sinatra, Judy Garland, and Bob Dylan.
And this is not the first time a body has been discovered in the Adelphi. Sir ‘Jock’ Delves Broughton, an aristocrat, was discovered dead in 1941 after killing himself during his trial for the death of his wife’s lover.