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Adil, 8, fell from a mountain in the school yard and hit his head on the asphalt. Afterwards, he showed several signs of a serious head injury.
Despite that, the ambulance took an hour.
Adil later died in hospital.
– I think about Adil all the time. He is my son. I love him so much, says mother Waafa.
It started as a normal school day. Adil, 8, took his backpack and his mother’s hand and walked with his siblings towards Sjumilaskolan in Biskopsgården in Gothenburg. A happy and bubbly boy who always made his mother smile.
This was his last day at school.
In the middle of Sjumilaskolan’s oblong schoolyard there is a steep mountain. The drop height can be up to several meters, depending on where on the mountain you measure.
Below the mountain: hard asphalt.
During the lunch break, Adil fell off the mountain and hit his head on the ground. He suffered such serious head injuries that he later died in hospital.
A year and a half has now passed and Adil’s mother Wafaa wants to know how it could have gone so wrong, when neither the school nor the municipality today say that any mistakes were made.
– I think about Adil all the time. He is my son. I love him so much. I’ve carried him for nine months in my stomach and now I can’t get him back, she says.
The time after Adil’s death has been tiring for Wafaa and Adil’s four siblings. The mother says that Adil’s siblings Adnan, Imran, Iman and Iklas have all been worried. The questions are many and they still don’t understand how it could go so badly that he died.
– It hurts so much, says Adil’s mother.
With the help of documents, investigations, journals, other public documents and the family’s secret audio recordings, Aftonbladet has reviewed what happened before and after the accident.
The ambulance took an hour
After Adil’s fall from the mountain, he was carried in by some ninth graders who allegedly saw him fall.
Even though Adil occasionally lost consciousness, it took the ambulance an hour to go out to Biskopsgården.
From the transcript of the call to SOS Alarm, which Aftonbladet has seen, it appears that the assistant principal at Sjumila School tried to explain to the nurse at SOS Alarm that Adil is “very absent”, has head injuries from falling down a mountain.
He says, according to the transcript of the emergency call, that Adil fell from a small mountain and hit his head on asphalt, that he was carried in by other students and that he has wounds on his face.
But the nurse on the phone encourages the school to ask the boy’s mother, who is on her way there, to drive him to a health center to look at him, so they don’t have to send an ambulance.
Error in the school’s investigation
But they choose to wait for an ambulance. While they wait, Adil is taken care of by the school staff. Sjumilaskolan is a municipal school and the city of Gothenburg is the principal. In the principal’s investigation, which was published three months after Adil’s death, it is stated that a school nurse was there and took care of Adil.
“The mother arrived at the scene about 10 minutes later. Those who were there and took care of the student were both assistant principals, the mentor, the school nurse and the mother.”
But what the municipality writes in its investigation is not entirely true.
In one of the school’s calls to 112, assistant principal Ajdin Smajlovic says something else instead:
“What’s a bit difficult today is that the school nurse isn’t there right now at this time /../”
He tells the reporter today that a school nurse was working that day but that she only came after a while. He has no answer as to why that information is missing from the municipality’s own investigation.
– I met a student who fell and injured himself, and saw that the school nurse wasn’t there and I got worried when I didn’t get in great contact with him, explains assistant principal Ajdin Smajlovic to Aftonbladet.
25 minutes later, the assistant principal calls 112 again. Then Adil’s condition has deteriorated further.
Only at 12:45, over an hour after Adil fell, does the ambulance arrive at the school and then drive Adil to the pediatric intensive care unit at Östra sjukhuset in Gothenburg.
On the way to the hospital, he loses consciousness and the oxygen level drops to 85 percent. The paramedics wake the boy up by pain stimulation on the sternum.
The mother pleaded for help
Before the accident, Adil’s mother had been appealing to the school for help and support for her child for more than a year. The Sjumila school knew that the boy had left the school grounds on a few occasions and that he had also been late from breaks, so in 2021 the school deployed an extra resource for him, after the school made a report of concern to social services.
The school is said to have called Wafaa on a few occasions and told her that Adil had left the area, but without knowing how long he had been gone or where he had gone, she says.
– Sometimes when I came to school he had scratches, or was swollen after he hit himself.
The school said he climbed trees and fell down, or that he was on the roof, and sometimes they didn’t know where he was, says mother Wafaa.
The investigation from the social services finally concluded that the mother and Adil were not in need of help from the social services, as the school (during school hours) and the family (during free time) were deemed to be able to provide the support that was needed. Towards the end of the investigation, it appears that the situation in Adil’s class has calmed down because the school has hired a teacher and stopped using substitutes.
The social service made the assessment that Adil needed a safe school environment, but that things calmed down after the school hired a new teacher for Adil’s class.
Shortly after the social service’s decision, Sjumilaskolan withdrew Adil’s extra support.
The main man: We can’t keep track of the kids
In the municipality’s own investigation from last year, it is stated that Sjumila School did mostly everything right despite the fact that Adil died, and that it is not reasonable to interpret the law as requiring the school to have full supervision of the students during school hours.
“The school’s supervisory responsibility does not mean that the school’s staff must supervise all students during every minute that they are in the school, but intervene to a reasonable extent to prevent dangerous or inappropriate situations or activities,” says the principal’s own investigation into the events.
The School Inspectorate’s report, which came just a few months later, goes in the opposite direction. The supervisory authority refers to decisions from the Supreme Court and the Ombudsman, where it has been established that the supervisory responsibility lies with the school, since we have compulsory schooling in Sweden, and that the school must make an assessment based on, among other things, the maturity of the child.
“The School Inspectorate can thus establish that it is a younger student in the primary school who has previously been prone to running away and is therefore judged to be in need of increased supervision,” says the School Inspectorate’s decision from the summer of 2022.
In the same decision, the School Inspectorate states that Adil has left a supervised area, without the break guards having detected it.
When Adil fell from the mountain there was no fence at the bottom and the children could climb up without any problems. The problems with the mountain were known, say staff that Aftonbladet has been in contact with. Despite that, and despite a major renovation of the schoolyard a few years ago, no shelters had been put up.
– The school staff had told the children several times that they were not allowed to play there, says an employee at the school.
The municipality: put up a warning sign
Aftonbladet has requested about a hundred documents from the City of Gothenburg relating to the Sjumila School. One of these documents that the municipality has released is a handwritten A4 page from one of the school’s former principals, who lists meetings with the municipality’s local supply when, according to the document, the school should have pointed out the risks of the mountain in the school yard.
At a construction meeting with the municipality’s local administration in 2018, according to the document, Sjumila School must have addressed the risks of having a steep mountain in the school yard. The school must then have asked the municipality for a fallout mat. But the municipality is said to have instead proposed to put up a sign with the message “climbing prohibited”. The document states:
“The school made it clear that it does not remove the risk and, moreover, it assumes that all children can read and know Swedish.”
But even though they should have warned about the problem, the mountain was left without action.
Happy and mischievous guy
Adil’s mother describes a happy and mischievous guy with his own Tiktok account, who wanted to become a YouTuber.
A guy who liked to run and climb. Every Friday she visits his grave in Gothenburg.
– I usually watch his movies to hear his laugh, I love that laugh so much. My friends and family tell me not to watch too much because it’s not good to get stuck. But I can’t, she says.
Only after Adil’s death was a metal fence erected to prevent the children from climbing the mountain. But during the reporter’s visit to the school yard in early summer, more than a year after Adil’s death, there were still traces of children on the mountain. A few pieces plus plus, a green broken spade.
A year and a half later, when this year’s autumn term began, the municipality raised money to build over the mountain with a wooden staircase that the children can sit on.