'I heard a scream and ran to find my son dying on ground'

The father of a two-year-old boy killed by a fairground rollercoaster wept as he told an inquest of the moment he found his son dying on the ground.

Erjon Hyseni suffered fatal head injuries after straying into the path of the Go-Gator ride at Ducketts Common in Wood Green.

Erjon, from Bounds Green, who was on a trip to the fairground with his father Lulzim, was pronounced dead soon after arriving at hospital.

Speaking with the help of a translator, Mr Hyseni, a Kosovan Albanian, described how he saw his son walking between two bouncy castle-type rides near the rollercoaster, then lost sight of him.

He heard a scream and ran to find an injured child lying on the ground next to the Go-Gator.

"I saw an accident had happened to a child but I did not know it was Erjon. Then I turned my head again and I saw his hair," he told North London coroner's court.

"I bent down to pick him up and there was a person who told me not to touch him and pushed me away." He said he had been unable to get to his son because a woman restrained him, but was later taken by police to the hospital, where Erjon's mother, Migena, told him their little boy had died.

Mr Hyseni told the jury there was no security fence stopping him from getting to his son in the seconds after the accident in May 2009, seemingly contradicting claims by fairground bosses of an unbroken line of metal fence panels surrounding the ride. When asked if the fence could have been taken down before he got there, he said: "There was no fence. It would have been easy to notice the fence if it was there."

The funfair was organised by Hertfordshire-based JEA Manning and Sons, which has been in the business for almost 200 years. Owner Joseph Manning, who tried to resuscitate Erjon while he waited for an ambulance, said the death was the first in the company's history. He said he did not order any changes to the way the fence panels were laid out around the ride, and he believed "if a child is determined enough to get over a fence they will".

Mr Manning said: "I put it down to an extraordinary accident. It is a one-off thing and you can't explain why it has happened." In earlier evidence he said he had assumed at first the child had fallen off the ride, before staff said he got past fences separating the rollercoaster from another part of the fair.

He said: "Somehow or other he got over the fence. He didn't fall off the Go-Gator, he came over the fence. They were saying he came from the Fun Bags."

The hearing continues.