A former New York banker had to make the heart-wrenching decision over which of his two injured children to help during the Sri Lanka terror attacks — only for them both to die.
Rutgers grad Matthew Linsey, 60, told the Times of London how Amelie, 15, and Daniel, 19, were both unconscious after the suicide bomb blast during breakfast in the Shangri-La Hotel in Sri Lanka’s capital, Colombo.
Believing his son was the more seriously hurt, the American dad — also injured by shrapnel — tried to revive him and raced him to a hospital.
His desperate efforts were in vain as attempted heart massage treatment by doctors failed to save Daniel’s life.
Linsey told the Times how he had been forced to leave daughter Amelie behind in the carnage — devastated to later learn that she too died.
“My son looked worse than my daughter. I tried to revive him,” the grieving investor told the Times of his children, both dual citizens of the UK and US.
“A lady said she’d take my daughter. I carried my son downstairs to an ambulance, we took him to the hospital. I yelled, ‘Please help my son! Please help! Please help!’
“I thought my daughter was better off. I couldn’t find her because I was with my son. They sadly passed away.”
The devastating bomb blast came during their last day of vacation in Sri Lanka. His wife, Angelina, and two other children — David, 21, and Ethan, 12 — were in the UK, where the family now lives.
“You can’t describe how bad it was,” Linsey recalled of the explosion.
“People were screaming. I was with my children. I couldn’t tell whether they were all right, it was dark. I was worried there would be another blast. We ran out — another blast.
“We both went to where the lifts were and I couldn’t move them, they were both knocked out.”
Linsey, who lived and worked in New York in the ’90s as vice president of Chase Manhattan, said his son had been a keen charity worker who had volunteered in Ethiopia for an orphanage and with nomads in Mongolia.
The grieving dad said his daughter, a pupil at London’s Godolphin and Latymer School, was “beautiful inside and out.”
“Amelie was really fun. She was smart, beautiful. Very loving, very caring, understanding. She cared about her family and her friends. And the same with Danny,” he told the Times of London.
“Both children were very interested in different cultures.
“They loved traveling abroad. That’s a very important part of who they were.”
The dad, who studied at the University of Michigan as well as Rutgers, suffered cuts to his face from shrapnel and was helped by the US Embassy, which arranged for him to travel home to London that day. He is now trying to arrange for the repatriation of his son’s and daughter’s bodies.
The teens are the third and fourth confirmed American deaths, the number Sri Lankan officials gave as a total.
The others are Dieter Kowalski, 40, of Denver, and 11-year-old Kieran Shafritz de Zoysa, a fifth-grade student at Sidwell Friends school in DC, which President Barack Obama’s daughters attended.