Saffron Cole-Nottage was 32 years old. She drowned after her head became trapped between sea defense rocks in Lowestoft. Her family called her "truly one of a kind" — a woman who could light up any room.
The inquest heard that emergency services were called at 7:52 PM. But the fire service didn't arrive until 8:22 PM. By then, the mother of one was already dead.
Alex Singleton-Dent was walking along the promenade around 8 PM when he heard a girl screaming for help. He looked over the railings and saw a child shouting for her mother.
He climbed down and shone his phone on the rocks. "I could see two legs sticking out from them," he recalled.
The girl begged him to pull her mother out. Another man, Ian Jones, joined the effort. They tugged and pulled, but it was impossible. "We just couldn't," Singleton-Dent said.
Jones estimated they spent about ten minutes pulling the woman's legs. "We just couldn't pull her with enough force to free her," he stated.
Singleton-Dent described an agonizing wait: "It felt like we were trying for ages. The emergency services didn't arrive for hours. My adrenaline was going." He noticed the woman became unresponsive as the tide crept in.
Meanwhile, the girl watched in terror. Her mother was "screaming and asking for us to get her out." The wait for an ambulance "felt like an eternity."
"I can't help but think if the ambulance arrived a little sooner, they might have been able to do something," the daughter said in a statement. Eventually, she believed her mother's head went under water.
Saffron's partner, Mike Wheeler, said she was used to walking along the concrete stretch beyond the promenade. She'd fished there with her father as a child.
On the day she died, Saffron had enjoyed a Sunday roast and a few drinks at the Hatfield Hotel. Wheeler said she wasn't slurring her words — she seemed normal when she left for a walk with one of their children around 7 PM.
He grew worried when he heard a helicopter and realized they'd been gone for an hour. The pathologist later found 271 milligrams of alcohol per 100 milliliters of blood in her system — enough to have "significantly impaired her cognitive abilities."
Her cause of death was drowning. The inquest, expected to last two weeks, continues.
