He was 18 years old and was taking advantage of his holidays before entering Oxford University to study English Philology. A brilliant future that was cut short on the 19th, when the yacht he was travelling on with his father, Mike Lynchhis mother, Angela Bacares, shipwrecked on the coast of Sicily. Hannah She was the youngest daughter of the couple, and had a sister, aged 21. Very close to her family, she was celebrating the release of her father after a year of house arrest for an alleged crime of fraud, of which he was acquitted last June. Late on Thursday, the young woman was the only missing person after the rescue of 15 survivors and the discovery of five bodies, including that of her father. The rescue teams say that the chances of her still being alive are almost zero.
Hannah had just finished her studies at the prestigious Latymer High School in Hammersmith and her classmates and teachers are devastated: “We are all incredibly shocked by Hannah’s news”She kept a very low profile but is known to have excelled in everything related to literature. Winner of several literary awards as a young writer, she had also won the William C. Smith Prize for poetry. “She was a supernova and a staunch feminist”one of her friends said to The Times. “Hannah was gentle and kind, yet funny and a voracious reader. She said she inherited her father’s intelligence.”
His mother, one of the survivors
Mike Lynch’s widow and Hannah’s mother, Angela Bacares, was one of the 15 survivors of the shipwreck. She is “in a state of shock” and is being treated by a team of specialists. She is staying in a hotel near the port of Porticello. In her first statements after the incident, she recounted the terror she felt during the sinking of the sailboat.
At around 5 a.m. last Monday, Bacares noticed a slight tilt in the boat that woke her up. Everything seemed to be going normally, but the disaster was only just beginning. Windows in different areas of the boat soon broke, as did the main mast of the sailboat, causing it to begin to sink. Bacares says that several people got up to see what was happening, but they didn’t give it much importance until it was too late.