A 27-year-old woman who had suffered a severe brain injury and six of her friends died of a stroke nearly seven years later when a balcony collapsed during her 21st birthday.
Aoife Berry of Blackrock, South Dublin, was taken to Beaumont Hospital in Dublin on Wednesday after suffering a stroke. He died on Saturday due to illness.
Six of Berry’s friends died while celebrating her 21st birthday at the Library Garden apartment in Berkeley, californiaThey were standing after the fifth floor balcony collapsed on 16 June 2015.
Berry, who advocated for the creation of companies to release public safety records after the tragedy, was one of seven survivors of the incident.
The group of students was in the US as part of a popular J-1 summer working visa program that attracted thousands of young Irish people to the United States annually.
Berry suffered life-threatening injuries such as brain trauma, broken bones and limb wounds, and on his way back home in California and Ireland had a long recovery that included an open heart surgery.
It is not clear whether his death was related to injuries sustained in the 2015 incident.
Aoife Berry, 27, of Blackrock, South Dublin, was taken to Dublin’s Beaumont Hospital on Wednesday after suffering a stroke.
Angela and Aoife Berry of Dublin, Ireland, as state lawmakers on the Assembly Appropriations Committee, discuss SB465 with Kevin Byrne, Deputy Consul General of the Irish Consulate General in Sacramento, Calif., August 10, 2016.
The fifth-floor balcony was painted shortly after the June 2016 collapse in which six people were killed and seven others were injured.
In recent years, Berry had studied Oxford Brookes University in England.
At the time of the accident, she was Studying for a degree in Pharmacology at the University of California, Davis.
In August 2016, Berry told politicians before the California state legislature that his injuries had forced him to withdraw his education, and that he had lost his independence.
At that time he said, ‘Some of my injuries will stay with me for the rest of my life.’ ‘My life has changed forever.’
One Direction with Berkeley Tragedy Survivor Aoife Berry
Olivia Burke, Ioghan Kalgan, Nikolai Schuster, Lorcan Miller, Ayer Walsh, all 21 from Ireland, and Irish-American Ashley Donohoe, 22, died after a balcony collapsed under the weight of 13 people.
‘Now my birthday will always be his anniversary,’ he added of his friends’ tragic deaths.
Before his death on Saturday, Berry had prompted construction companies to release public safety records to California’s building regulator, irish timeReported.
Olivia Burke, Ioghan Kalgan, Nikolai Schuster, Lorcan Miller, Ayer Walsh, all 21 from Ireland, and Irish-American Ashley Donohoe, 22, died after a balcony collapsed under the weight of 13 people.
AOIF with Stanford Medical Staff in Berkeley, California, USA
The balconies of the apartments were designed as ‘decorations’, not as a fortified place for large groups of people to live.
Officials later revealed that the wooden beams supporting the balcony were water damaged and rotten.
Niall Murray, Sean Fahey, Connor Flynn and Jack Halpin and Clodagh Cawley, Hannah Walters and Berry survived the accident.
Foreign students, most of whom were from South Dublin, were visiting Berkeley, California on the popular J1 working visa programme, which attracts thousands of Irish students annually.
According to the committee that approved the Library Garden complex in 2001, the apartment balconies were designed as a ‘decoration’ as a strong space for large groups of people to stand.
The apartments in the Library Gardens complex were a timber frame construction, and the balconies were turned out of the building, with no additional supports below.
Officials later revealed that the wooden beams supporting the balcony were water damaged and rotten.