Woman died after being caught in garage door mechanism, inquest told

A woman died after she was dragged upwards into the mechanism of an underground car park’s roller shutter door, an inquest has heard.

Heidi Chalkley, 40, had been on the way out for the night when she took hold of the door as it rose from the entrance to the garage of a friend’s block of flats and was lifted off the ground.

Her friend, Susan Gilmore, told an inquest in Huntingdon, Cambridgeshire: “As it went up Heidi said to me, ‘Have you ever held on to it as it goes up?’ I said, ‘No.’ She then reached up, held the shutter and it lifted her off the ground.”

Gilmore, who rang 999, continued: “I thought she would let go but she started to panic as her hands got caught in the barrier. Everything happened really quickly, in a matter of seconds.”

Chalkley, a social worker and mother, died at the scene in Cambridge on 14 August 2016. A postmortem examination gave her cause of death as multiple injuries, noting fractures to her ribs, spine, arms and jawbone. It recorded that she had no alcohol or drugs in her system.

A neighbour, James Spitale, told the inquest how he had tried to save her life by lifting her body up to release pressure on her neck. He said that he had heard someone on the phone sounding “incredibly distressed” and then saw a woman hanging about a metre from the ground at the entrance to the car park of Ruth Bagnall Court, a block of flats in Coleridge Road.

In a statement, he said: “My immediate thought was to grab her and lift her up. I hoped it would release the pressure on her neck and allow her to breathe.”

When emergency services arrived they told him it was too late, he said.

In a statement, Chalkley’s family said she had hundreds of friends, “everyone who ever met her warmed to her magnetism” and without her “this world is a much colder place”. The inquest continues.