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On a leafy street in Wimbledon Village, where some of south London’s wealthiest inhabitants park luxury cars behind imposing security gates, one driveway sticks out like the proverbial sore thumb.
There is no collection of Porsches, Maseratis and SUVs outside this towering £4million mansion. Instead, the owners appear to have decided to make do with a moth-eaten Mini plus a four-year-old Volkswagen van.
It wasn’t ever thus. In 2023 the lady of the house, an investment banker’s wife and mother-of-three Claire Freemantle, cruised the streets in a top-of-the-range Land Rover Defender with a gold bonnet, tinted windows, black alloy wheels and a £160,000 price tag.
Then came the awful morning of July 6, when she lost control of the Chelsea tractor while driving down a narrow road adjacent to Wimbledon Common.
The 2.5-ton supercar smashed through the fence of The Study Prep, a local school, then careered 20 yards across a lawn where by a tragic twist of fate Year Three pupils and their parents were enjoying an end-of-term picnic.
There was ‘a bang, scraping metal and screams’, according to witnesses who spoke to the Mail. By the time Ms Freemantle’s Land Rover had come to a halt, having crashed into the school hall, a major disaster had unfolded.
A flurry of 999 calls at 9.54am saw 15 ambulances and 35 police cars arrive. Some 16 people were treated for injuries, with a dozen taken to hospital. Tragically, two girls, both eight, didn’t make it. Selena Lau died at the scene and Nuria Sajjad succumbed to her injuries three days later.
It’s now almost three years since that terrible day. But the parents of the two girls, along with various other victims – who may or may not include Claire Freemantle – are yet to enjoy much in the way of closure.
Two agonisingly slow investigations, each lasting more than a year, have been and gone. An inquest into the deaths of Selena and Nuria was opened but immediately adjourned. And the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS), which in 2024 declined to file criminal charges against Ms Freemantle, is now re-visiting that decision.
This March it received a new dossier from detectives who spent last year ‘re-investigating’ concerns the initial inquiry was botched. A verdict is expected from the CPS at the end of the month. It is currently weighing up a legal opinion submitted on April 7.
The long-running – and already baffling – saga took a further twist on Tuesday, when it emerged 11 Met Police officers are being investigated by the Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC) over their handling of the original inquiry. The new probe will not only focus on the competency of that inquiry but will also establish whether the information being given to the grieving parents was ‘false and misleading’.
The IOPC has also been instructed to get to the bottom of potentially toxic claims that the Met’s handling of the case was tainted by racism. Specifically, it will seek to establish whether officers treated the victims’ families, who are of Asian heritage, with ‘unconscious bias’, while failing to properly question Ms Freemantle’s account due to her status as a wealthy and privileged white woman.
Wherever things end up, it’s already creating ugly headlines for London’s police force.
On Tuesday Nuria’s mother Smera Chohan gave an angry interview to the BBC alleging the Met had failed to conduct a ‘competent and thorough investigation’. She said: ‘I hope the IOPC will cover that. I really want to understand why I have been treated so cruelly, unfairly and in an inhumane way. I would like the keepers of law, of the system, to come and tell me.’
At the centre of this saga lies one crucial question: how did Claire Freemantle, then 46 years old, so comprehensively lose control of her SUV while driving down a 20mph street?
Having visited the scene earlier this week, I can say with some confidence this was no ordinary road traffic accident. The wooden fence her car drove through sits on a quiet, single-track street, just opposite Wimbledon Common Golf Club’s car park. It’s neither a hot spot for speeding nor a remotely hazardous stretch of road. For any car, even a high-powered model, to suddenly mount the kerb, cross the pavement and then career into the school hall, a driver would have to have temporarily taken leave of their senses.
As it happens, Ms Freemantle, who is understood to have tested negative for both drink and drugs, agrees. In fact, she offers a simple explanation: ‘I have since been diagnosed as having suffered an epileptic seizure with loss of consciousness’ at the wheel, leaving her with ‘no recollection of what took place’. She further claims to have never previously had such a seizure (‘it was not a pre-existing condition’) so had no way to know it might happen.
A full independent medical report was provided by the defence diagnosing an epileptic attack and seen by the prosecution’s own neurological expert and accepted by the CPS. Ms Freemantle would also have had examinations by other experts.
As her solicitor, Mark Jones, a partner at top-end law firm Payne Hicks Beach, has put it: ‘Although she was at the wheel when this shocking accident happened, she was in no sense in control of the vehicle. This incident was through absolutely no fault of her own.’
If Ms Freemantle’s defence is true, she could not have done anything to prevent the tragedy, which would make it impossible for any charges (she was initially arrested on suspicion of causing death by dangerous driving) to stick. In fact, it would make her one of the many victims of the incident.
What, then, of the potential case against her? Well, here’s where things get sticky. Any future prosecution must hinge on this version of events somehow being false.
The CPS would have to make one of two arguments successfully: either it would need to convince a court Ms Freemantle never had an epileptic seizure on the morning of July 6, 2023, or it would need to prove that seizure wasn’t her first. In the latter circumstances, she would be guilty of failing to inform the DVLA of an epileptic fit, which usually results in a driver having their licence removed until they have been seizure-free for 12 months.
While sources close to the investigation have their cards extremely close to their chests, and neither the victims’ families nor their lawyer Trevor Sterling will comment on the various inquiries, the Daily Mail understands the first of these two allegations (that she never actually had a seizure) is likely to be at the centre of any future case.
We should, of course, stress at this stage, like all potential defendants, Ms Freemantle is entitled to have her version of events treated entirely on its merits. She intends to vigorously maintain her innocence and must be regarded as such unless found guilty in a court of law.
All of which brings us back to the 2023 inquiry, now the subject of an IOPC investigation. Given the awful situation, the whole thing ought to have been extraordinarily thorough. Yet for reasons the IOPC will doubtless be probing, officers failed to interview many important witnesses, including Helen Lowe, then headteacher of The Study Prep, a £21,000-a-year school for girls aged four to 11.
In July 2024, more than a year after the accident, Ms Lowe told how she had been one of the first people on the scene and had seen the driver exiting the vehicle. Despite providing her details to police, she was never asked to provide a statement. ‘I sort of assumed we would be [contacted] and we haven’t,’ she said.
The failure to interview a potential key witness is especially baffling because evidence about how Ms Freemantle behaved in the immediate aftermath of the incident would be absolutely critical in helping a court work out whether she had indeed suffered a fit.
In normal circumstances, a sufferer will enter something known as the ‘postictal state’, which typically lasts between five and 30 minutes. Symptoms include extreme confusion, fatigue and memory loss and can extend to bouts of psychosis.
One unnamed witness who spoke to the Wimbledon Guardian described Ms Freemantle as ‘in a delirious condition’ after the accident and said she had ‘bitten through her tongue’.
In the fog of an unfolding disaster, other first-hand accounts may differ. But it’s unclear what steps were taken to track the various other witnesses down and take statements.
The IOPC is also understood to be probing how the police examined Ms Freemantle’s subsequent claims regarding her medical condition.
Establishing whether someone has epilepsy is notoriously tricky without conducting scans and blood tests shortly after a seizure, as well as scrutinising a patient’s medical history.
Ms Freemantle has never publicly shared how or when she obtained her diagnosis, but sources close to her say it was made by an independent medical expert appointed by the police, who also had access to her clinical records. What we do know, however, is the CPS initially accepted this version of events.
In June 2024, it announced she wouldn’t face charges, saying that having scrutinised a file of evidence supplied by the police: ‘It is not in the public interest to pursue a prosecution’.
Ms Freemantle issued a statement the same day expressing ‘heartfelt sympathy’ to ‘all of the children and families affected’, adding: ‘Since I became aware of the terrible event that took place on July 6, the devastating consequences for all those affected have not left my thoughts and will be with me for the rest of my life.’
She says she is unable to give investigators much insight because she is unable to remember any details.
The 2024 statement remains the last time she has spoken publicly about the case. And she has executed a remarkably successful campaign to keep herself out of the spotlight. The family home has entirely disappeared from Google’s Street View, while photographs of Ms Freemantle have been wiped from social media.
The only image in circulation shows her with husband Dominic, a former executive at Morgan Stanley who now works for a firm called Lincoln Private Investment Office, walking their dogs around Wimbledon Park last year.
An article in an interiors magazine, which was published around the time of the tragedy (but seemingly compiled beforehand) detailing a nearly £700,000 refurbishment of their six-bedroom home, with its ‘smoked bronze’ bathroom fittings and ‘oak and boucle paper-panelled dressing room’ was likewise expunged from the internet.
In normal circumstances, Ms Freemantle might have succeeded in being forgotten. But so dissatisfied were the families of Selena and Nuria that in the summer of 2024 they filed a complaint with police saying they were ‘unconvinced the investigation has been conducted thoroughly’.
An official review agreed and that October the case was reopened. This time, the Met Police placed one of their most experienced officers in charge of the whole thing.
He is Detective Superintendent Lewis Basford, head of the force’s specialist crime review group, who came to prominence during the 2023 search for Constance Marten and Mark Gordon, who went on the run with their newborn and later concealed the baby’s body.
On taking over the case, Basford identified ‘lines of inquiry’ which required further examination. He re-arrested Ms Freemantle last January and interviewed her again in July.
With the new file of evidence supplied to the CPS on March 17, and the further legal advice it received last week, we will find out in the coming days where the whole thing will lead.
But after almost three years, the victims of this awful and baffling tragedy seem finally to be in with a shout of getting some answers.
