Nearly three decades after the tragic Paris car crash that claimed the life of Diana, Princess of Wales, chilling details continue to emerge about her final moments.
On the night of August 31, 1997, Diana was travelling through the Place de l’Alma underpass in Paris in the back of a black Mercedes-Benz S280 alongside Egyptian film producer Dodi Fayed. The vehicle, driven by Henri Paul, the deputy head of security at the Ritz Hotel, crashed at high speed while attempting to flee a swarm of paparazzi.
Henri Paul—later found to be intoxicated by alcohol and prescription drugs—died instantly, as did Dodi. Trevor Rees-Jones, Dodi’s bodyguard and the only passenger wearing a seatbelt, survived. Diana, just 36 years old, was critically injured and rushed to Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital, where she later died from internal bleeding.
The Last Words of the People’s Princess
Among the first to arrive at the scene was French emergency doctor Frederic Mailliez, who happened to be driving through the tunnel. He recalled Diana being conscious but clearly in pain, repeatedly saying how badly she was hurting.
Former firefighter Xavier Gourmelon, who led the response team, has also spoken about the moment he reached the wreckage. In an interview with The Independent and later with Good Morning Britain, Gourmelon revealed the four words Diana uttered before losing consciousness:
“My God, what’s happened?”
Gourmelon explained that he tried to calm her down, believing she would survive her injuries. After going into cardiac arrest, Diana briefly regained consciousness following CPR, but her condition deteriorated rapidly after she was transferred to the ambulance.
“To be honest, I thought she would live,” Gourmelon told The Sun in 2017. “But I found out later she had died in hospital. It was very upsetting. The memory of that night will stay with me forever.”
At the time, Gourmelon said he did not even realise the injured woman was Princess Diana until paramedics informed him.
A Rare, Fatal Injury
In his 2019 memoir Unnatural Causes, Dr Richard Shepherd, one of Britain’s leading forensic pathologists, explained that Diana’s death was caused by a “tiny, badly placed tear” in a vein of her lung—a rare injury he had never seen before in his career.
He added that had Diana been wearing her seatbelt, she likely would have survived the crash, perhaps only sustaining minor injuries such as a black eye, broken ribs, and a fractured arm. “She would probably have appeared in public two days later,” Shepherd wrote.
A Nation in Mourning
Diana’s sudden death sent shockwaves across the globe. Her body was returned to the UK, and on September 6, 1997, millions of mourners lined the streets for her funeral procession, which travelled from St James’s Palace to Westminster Abbey.
She was laid to rest on a secluded island within the grounds of Althorp, her family’s ancestral estate in Northamptonshire.
More than 25 years on, the haunting words she spoke in those final moments still echo, a poignant reminder of a life cut short and a princess whose legacy endures.
