A “vibrant” teenage girl was found dead in her bedroom by her mum who’d last seen her doing her hair for school.
Grace Billows was found unresponsive on the floor of her room at home in Bootle, Merseyside, last week on what had otherwise been a regular school day, her mum has said. The 15-year-old was seen getting ready on Tuesday, February 11, as mum Lisa left to take her other daughter, Alice, to a hospital appointment.
But Lisa’s return home was met with horror as she found Grace collapsed and unconscious, in what she believes to have been an epileptic seizure. Grace had been diagnosed with the condition last year and was also living with Coeliac disease at the time.
“She was vibrant and so full of life,” mum Lisa, 62, told the Liverpool ECHO. “She was stubborn, she was sarcastic and she would always make you laugh with the things that would come out of her mouth. She loved her history, if you started a conversation with her you couldn’t stop her.”
The cause of Grace’s death is yet to be confirmed, but Lisa believes her daughter suffered a seizure while on her own from which she was unable to recover. The teenager had been in her final year of high school, but had not let her illnesses previously stop her from living her life.
“She was so full of life and she had so much to live for, so many plans,” Lisa added. “She was going to join KGV [King George V sixth form in Southport] when she finished school to study history, English literature, English language and drama.”
“She loved history so much, it was her life. She would watch history TV shows, she knew so much. I was so proud of her, she was doing so well, she really was. She was so helpful, she would always helpful around the house. She had OCD so she was so clean and tidy.”
Lisa, a full-time carer, said she had booked to go shopping with Grace to buy her prom dress before her sudden death. Lisa added: “My daughter would have gone on to be something, she would have made it in life. We had plans together, we were meant to be going shopping this Tuesday for her prom dress.”
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