18th June 2025

A grieving dad who survived the Grenfell Tower fire has shared the heartbreaking moment that doctors were forced to choose between saving the life of his pregnant wife or his unborn child.

Speaking to Cat Deeley and Ben Shepherd on today’s episode (Wednesday 18^th June) of This Morning, dad Marcio Gomes, recounted his family’s devastating experience.

The dad was living on the 21^st floor of Grenfell Tower with his wife, who was seven months pregnant, and their two young daughters when the fire broke out on the 14^th of June 2017.

Sharing his experience eight years later, Marcio recalled: “'I was woken at 1.15am in the morning with the neighbour banging on the door which I'm forever grateful because if it wasn't for that, we would've been sleeping.”

The family was told by the fire brigade to stay inside their flat. But as Marcio began preparing wet towels to keep the fire at bay, and after multiple attempts to contact the fire brigade, he realised that he would need to find a way for himself and his family to get out.

He explained: “Probably about an hour into it, I would say [is] when I really understood how bad it was, we'd had fires in the tower before, not generally a problem.

“Of course that night it was very different.”

Marcio continued: “An hour into it when I tried to go into my neighbour’s house and I opened the door, it was pitch black, the lights were on but it was pitch black.”

Describing the thick, black smoke that filled the corridor, Marcio said: “It was awful, it was something I've never experienced before... as soon as you breathed that in you was just gagging, it was a horrific smell, it was something I can never really describe that well.

“That's when I knew it was really bad.”

The family made two attempts to leave the flat. Recalling the moment they knew they had to leave, Marcio said: “As I looked into the bedroom, fire came through the window and set basically the room alight. At that point I said we've got to go, it's now or never, we couldn't stay in the flat.”

As they made their way down, the couple lost their two daughters in the thick, black smoke, but luckily found them again when they escaped the building.

Once at the hospital, doctors came to see Marcio with a devastating choice; they had to decide whether to save his wife, who was seven months pregnant and asthmatic, or his unborn son, Logan. He explained: “At the hospital, they came to me and said they had to make that decision because my wife was obviously alive, they had to go with her, which I said, yes, that's the choice.”

Marcio’s wife and his two daughters were placed in induced comas due to the smoke damage to their lungs, but thankfully survived.

72 people, including children, tragically lost their lives in the fire at the tower block in Kensington.

During the heartbreaking segment, Ben Shepherd read out a statement from the London Fire Brigade: “On the night of the fire, the brigade faced the most formidable challenge that any fire service in the UK has confronted in living memory.

“In 2019 the brigade accepted every recommendation from the Grenfell Tower enquiry phase one report and have since implemented significant changes to how we operate.”

Marcio is determined to keep the disaster in the news to avoid a repeat of the tragedy elsewhere. He is one of the Grenfell residents who contributed to a new Netflix documentary about the disaster, Grenfell: Uncovered.

Speaking to the Radio Times, Marcio said: “I can’t change what happened on that night to my family or anybody’s families.

“But I’m hoping that speaking out could save somebody else’s family. Up and down the country, you still have hundreds, maybe thousands of buildings with similar problems.”

Grenfell: Uncovered is now available to stream on Netflix.