Summer Robertson: Parents of Shrewsbury volunteer who drowned in South Africa to sue
The parents of a Shrewsbury woman who died while volunteering in South Africa are suing the organisation which arranged the trip.
Summer Robertson, 21, died along with Alice Barnett, 19, on December 4, 2014, when they drowned after being caught in a rip current while wading in the sea.
The families of both women have now issued a legal claim against the charity Lattitude Global Volunteering, which organised the trip, for a failure to ensure the safety of their daughters.
They say Lattitude provided no safety advice to volunteers regarding rip currents and did not take precautionary measures to assess the risk of going into the water.
An inquest held in 2015 concluded that Summer and Alice had “entered the water unaware of the risks of rip currents and were unable to escape when caught”.
The coroner also issued a prevention of future deaths report to Lattitude following the inquest, which raised concerns including the lack of a specific risk assessment in relation to rip currents and the need to obtain local advice and information from the nearest National Sea Rescue Institute
In a joint statement, Summer and Alice’s parents, Sarah and John Robertson, and Suzie and Peter Barnett, said they felt forced to take legal action to make sure no other parents are faced with a similar tragedy.
They said: “When Alice and Summer left for a period of volunteering in South Africa we could not have imagined the devastating way in which their trip would come to an end.
“Alice and Summer were independent young adults who wanted to make a difference in the world and we were proud of their decision to help others less fortunate than themselves.
“As parents we put our trust in Lattitude to look after our daughters and provide a safe environment for all their volunteers as they claimed they would.”
“This trust was utterly shattered by their disregard for the safety of those under their care which led to Alice and Summer’s deaths and was compounded further by their treatment of us all since then.
“We feel forced into taking legal action as Lattitude seem to close their door to us from the moment we questioned their ‘freak wave’ claim.
“Nothing will bring Alice and Summer back but we hope that we can get some answers to the questions we still have surrounding their deaths and that Lattitude will put in place measures to ensure that the same thing does not happen to any other family.”
