The Study is a small girls' preparatory school for pupils aged four to eleven, tucked into the leafy lanes south of the All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club. On 6 July 2023, the staff and children were marking the end of the school year with a party on the lawn. Sixteen people were treated at the scene and ten were taken to hospital. Those injured were pupils, parents, and carers. The school's staff escaped physical harm. The response was, in the words of one police statement, the largest local policing deployment in south-west London since 2017. By the end of July, all the hospitalised children had returned home. But two had not. Eight-year-old Selena Lau died the day of the crash. Nuria Sajjad, also eight, died three days later, on 9 July.

In the months that followed, Selena's parents released a video they had taken at the school concert held shortly before the crash: their daughter at the piano, working her way through Scott Joplin's The Entertainer, that bright bouncing rag that anyone who has ever taken piano lessons recognises. The video is what survives of her. Nuria's mother, who had been at the party and was herself badly injured, later told The Times that she could not give her dying daughter a final hug because her own bones were broken. Twenty families were eventually represented by the law firm Moore Barlow as they pressed for answers. The parents spoke openly to the press, on television, in interviews. They wanted the investigation to move faster. They wanted to understand.

The Metropolitan Police confirmed that part of the delay in their work was the lack of specialist forensic investigators. In June 2024, the Crown Prosecution Service announced that the driver, Claire Freemantle, would not face charges. She had suffered an epileptic seizure while driving, the CPS said, a condition she had not previously been diagnosed with and could not have anticipated. Her solicitor said that while she had been at the wheel, she had not been in control of the vehicle. The families were not satisfied. In July 2024 the Met announced a review of its investigation. On 28 January 2025, the driver was arrested on suspicion of causing death by dangerous driving. The case continues. The grief continues. There is no version of this story that ends cleanly.

The crash sent ripples beyond Wimbledon. Within a week, anti-SUV campaigners in Broughty Ferry, near Dundee, vandalised a Range Rover and pushed leaflets through neighbours' doors carrying photographs of the dead girls and a threatening question: will it be your SUV next? Local residents were shaken. In August, the Tyre Extinguishers, an activist group that deflates the tyres of large vehicles, slashed more than sixty tyres at a Land Rover dealership in Exeter and described it as retaliation for what had happened at The Study. Two families' tragedy was being conscripted into a culture war they had never asked to join. The parents, by contrast, focused on what they could change: faster investigations, better systems, the small mercies of an answer arriving while it still mattered.

Wimbledon Common stretches out behind Camp Road, more than a thousand acres of woodland, heath, and ponds. Joggers still pound the paths. Dogs still chase tennis balls. The Study still has its end-of-year tea parties, though the wooden fence has been replaced. A short walk to the northeast, the tennis championships fill the courts every July. From the air, this is one of the leafiest corners of London. From the ground, it is also one of the saddest. A bench, flowers, a quiet alcove near the school - the small markers that a community uses when there is no language equal to the loss. Selena and Nuria are remembered here by people who knew them and by many who never did.