Jacqueline Fanchini (Reporter)A BRIDE-TO-BE was found drowned at her family’s holiday home in Menorca by her fiancé on the day they were to visit the church where they might wed.
Emma Campbell, 29, of Winchfield, Hampshire, was drinking a glass of orange juice by the pool when her fiancé went out for a jog on the morning of July 3, an inquest heard on Wednesday.
The couple were scouting for wedding venues and had an appointment to view a church that same tragic morning.
“When I came home from a run I found my fiancée face down in the deep end of the pool.
“I jumped in and immediately pulled Emma to the surface and performed CPR to the best of my ability and screamed for help,” said fiancé George Mudford in a statement read out to the Basingstoke inquest.
He said Campbell was not a ‘morning person’ and had been of a quiet demeanour before Mudford left for his run.
Sally-Anne Le Clerc, Campbell’s mother, explained that her daughter was born with pulmonary atresia, a heart defect in which the pulmonary valve orifice fails to develop, reducing blood flow to the heart and lungs.
Campbell did not take medication for the condition as she had suffered no long-term effects after having been operated on once when she was a baby and then again when she was three years old.
North Hampshire coroner Andrew Bradley said: “I have no doubt it’s an accidental death, had she not been under water, the nature of this event would not have happened, it’s that helpless situation.”
Paramedics at the scene were unable to revive Campbell and post mortem examinations in Menorca and Basingstoke both gave a cause of death consistent with drowning.
