Just why did my daughter die?

Earlier this summer, Sue Miller - better known as the Liberal Democrat peer Baroness Miller - decided the time had come to visit Ecuador, the country where her 19-year-old daughter Charlotte suffered fatal burns from a live electricity wire. For months, she'd felt unable even to contemplate the trip. But as the anniversary of Charlotte's accident passed, she realised not only that she wanted to go there, but that she absolutely needed to.

The sequence of emotions one goes through after the death of a child, says Sue Miller, is unique to each parent and each situation. "Everyone's experience is their own. First of all I wanted to kill someone, then I wanted to blame someone, and only after that was I able to think rationally about why it had happened." The answers to the questions surrounding Charlotte's death have proved particularly elusive, however - largely because her case falls between two systems of inquiry, the British and the Ecuadorian.

Since Charlotte died of her injuries in Britain two weeks after the accident, the inquest into her death was heard here. Yet its cause lies in the coastal town of Montanita, Ecuador, and possibly within an underfunded electricity system that failed to ensure the most basic levels of safety.

Charlotte Miller was a vivacious, gregarious girl, full of drive and ambition. "Everyone thinks their kids are good at everything," says Sue Miller, now 48, in the garden of her cottage near Yeovil. "But she was a very talented artist. She was also very sociable, which is why she wanted to use her art as a vehicle to help other people." She didn't have a boyfriend, but was popular and made friends easily. Charlotte had attended St Anthony's-Leweston School near Sherborne, Dorset, and did her A-levels at Yeovil College.

At the end of her foundation course at Falmouth Art College, she decided to spend a year working and travelling before university in Bristol, where she would take a degree called Art in a Social Context. The six-month trip to South America - she took a series of jobs in shops and bars for six months to raise funds - was intended partly to learn Spanish and study South American art, but also to investigate ways in which she might use her skills to help the desperately poor street children of Ecuador. "Charlotte was excited by Latin American art with its vibrant colours, and wanted to see it in its context," says her mother.

"She had taken all the necessary precautions before she went on her trip - jabs and so forth - but she had her doubts about going so far, to somewhere so different, which is one of the reasons she had planned to go only for six months, not a year."

The accident happened two months into the trip. Charlotte was travelling with a close female friend, and they'd been to Mexico, Honduras, Nicaragua and Guatemala before they arrived in Ecuador, where their first stop was an orphanage in Quito - part of Charlotte's recce to find out how she could help when she returned after her degree. Charlotte had e-mailed home frequently, and had last spoken on the phone to her mum at Christmas; she sounded happy and confident.

The two girls decided to see in 2001 at the surf town of Montanita on the edge of the Pacific Ocean. Charlotte, a natural athlete, had learned to surf while studying in Falmouth, and was keen to get in some more practice.

It was late afternoon on 30 December when she decided to take a walk. She was on a quiet residential road, bouncing a basketball, when she was hit by an arc of high-voltage electricity from a live wire lying on the ground. The post holding it up had collapsed earlier that day, and, despite repeated phone calls to the electricity distribution company from families who lived nearby, hadn't been made safe.

So far, no one has been able to tell Sue Miller why this was allowed to happen. "Having been there, I now know it wasn't a remote or unpopulated place. Montanita itself is quite heavily promoted as a surfing town for tourists, and does have lovely surf, which is one of the things Charlotte liked."

A young woman who lived close by, and a passer-by who'd spent the day surfing, found Charlotte lying still on the road, and dragged her from the wire, at considerable risk to their own lives, then took her in the surfer's car to a local clinic. Her friend was alerted, and rushed to be with her. Later, Charlotte was driven with her friend to a hospital in the city of Guayaquil, a six-hour journey. "It seems everyone was very helpful," says Sue Miller, calmly. "In retrospect, I would have liked her to get to hospital quicker, and so would the people who helped, but they did their best and I can't fault that part of what happened."

One of the reasons for her own trip to Ecuador this July was to meet and thank the young woman and the surfer who'd stopped to help. "If somebody risks their life for you, you'd obviously like to say thank you, and Charlotte can't, so I wanted to say it for her. That was a very emotional part of the trip, but everything about it was emotional. Arriving at the airport, walking on the beach, all of it."

As soon as she received a phone call in the early hours of New Year's Eve, telling her that her daughter had been in an accident, Sue Miller made the arrangements to fly out to bring her home. The journey took almost 48 hours, with a stopover in Madrid. She arrived at the hospital and was told her daughter was in intensive care, and that she had suffered 40 per cent burns. They flew back to Britain in an air ambulance and were taken to the Frenchay Hospital in Bristol, where Charlotte underwent 25 hours of surgery. Her right leg was very badly damaged, and surgeons were unable to save it. Her condition was always critical, however, and two weeks later she died of multiple complications, with her mother, her father, John, a district councillor, and her younger sister, now 17, at her bedside.

"I needed to find out why the post hadn't been mended," says Sue Miller. "I wanted to know whether an accident like this was considered normal in Ecuador. Was the electricity company underinvested in? There are still a thousand questions like that. I think wherever in the world somebody dies, in a circumstance over which there are question marks, you should expect answers. Last year, I just didn't have the will to do this, but now I'm full of determination."

She has hired a lawyer in Ecuador to investigate on her behalf, and is considering whether legal action against the electricity company, Empressa Electrica Peninsula de Santa Elena, might extract information that hasn't been released so far. She still works as a county councillor and the campaigning spirit that earned her a life peerage in 1998 is now proving invaluable in her fight to find out why her daughter died.

Her mission has taught her a great deal about Ecuador itself, and its problems. According to Unicef figures, 80 per cent of the population is living in poverty. The street children whom Charlotte wanted to help are forced to work in order to eat, often becoming the major breadwinner in a household, and so sacrifice even a basic education. The cycle of poverty goes on.

Shortly after Charlotte's memorial service, Baroness Miller set up a fund to collect donations for the street children, and on her trip to Ecuador in July this year sought out an existing charity, Juconi, which works with children aged five to 16, to use the money for art projects.

"It was important to recognise what Charlotte had wanted to do. Aid work isn't just about delivering the food basket, or making sure some of the children can go to school," she says. "It's also about giving them things to do that are fun; many of these kids don't have access even to paper or crayons." At the charity's offices in Guayaquil, Sue Miller was convinced Charlotte would have approved.

It was a very vibrant sort of place," she says, tiredness suddenly entering her voice. "The offices were in a pleasant position overlooking the town, not by any means grand, but full of young people, including a couple of volunteers from England. It struck me instantly how much Charlotte would have loved being there."

Sue Miller doesn't think she'll go back to Ecuador for another couple of years. "I feel as though I've done that bit now, been through that part of the pain. But I won't know how I'll feel next year until it is next year." The fact that she sits in the House of Lords obviously makes not one jot of difference to her ability to cope with the sadness.

"I'm just a parent in this. I don't think my position makes me any less or more determined to find out why she died. All I want is to understand the bigger picture."

Juconi can be contacted through the International Children's Trust, 1020 Lincoln Road, Peterborough, PE4 6AL. Make cheques payable to ICT, marked Juconi Ecuador on the back; 01733 576 597.