The family of a baby boy killed by a falling lamp post are to take legal action against an engineer who mistakenly sawed through its foundations.
Kate and Christopher Hollis spoke angrily after a coroner ruled the death of their son Tommy the day before his first birthday was an accident.
He was crushed in his buggy as his nanny pushed him across a road near construction works in Chiswick.
His parents accused coroner Elizabeth Pygott of “compounding their grief” by banning their lawyer from asking key questions, calling council witnesses or cross-examining the workman.
They had asked Mrs Pygott to give the jury the option of an unlawful killing or open verdict. But the coroner said the only possible verdict was accidental death because there was not enough evidence to support anything else.
Outside West London coroner’s court Mrs Hollis, 40, a finance firm’s senior lawyer, said: “We knew it would be extremely challenging for us here.
“But we did not expect our anguish to be compounded by the coroner’s decision to exclude questions and evidence that may lead us to understand better how Tommy was killed.”
Engineer Kelvin Elmore, who cut the foundation thinking it was an old tramline, told the inquest he wished he could have died instead of Tommy. He was excused from answering questions and left in tears. The inquest heard workmen were under pressure from Hounslow council to complete a road project.
A lawyer for Mrs Hollis and her pilot husband, 42, said: “Legal action will be pursued against those responsible for the death of Tommy Hollis.”
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