‘Mom, Happy New Year, I love you’: A mother’s search for her son after Swiss blaze

Summary

• Laetitia Brodard seeks news of her son, Arthur, missing after a fire at Le Constellation in Crans-Montana which killed 40 and injured 119.
• Brodard shared Arthur's last message and video from the party, expressing frustration at the slow identification process due to burned remains.
• Despite false leads and distress, Brodard understands authorities' caution but urgently wants to locate Arthur, whether in hospital or the morgue.

CRANS-MONTANA, Switzerland - The last message Laetitia Brodard received from her son Arthur came just minutes into 2026, as he was celebrating New Year’s Eve with friends in the Swiss ski resort town Crans-Montana.

The message that pinged on her phone at 12.03am read “Mom, Happy New Year, I love you.”

“I replied to him: ‘I love you, my big boy’,” she said, adding that at 1.28am, she “found a short video he had sent to his friends, showing the whole table together, celebrating”.

Just minutes later, the first phone call was placed to emergency services to report a fire at Le Constellation, and soon the basement of the bar that was crammed with revellers was engulfed in flames.

“So, was it my son’s table that burned?” the Swiss woman from Lausanne asked.

“It’s been 40 hours. Forty hours since our children disappeared, so now we need to know,” she told reporters in front of a makeshift memorial near Le Constellation.

The fire left 40 dead and 119 injured, according to an updated toll provided by authorities on the afternoon of Jan 2.

Providing DNA

“If our boys are dead, ok, but don’t wait three or four days to give us the news,” she said.

“What if my Arthur is in a hospital, alone in an intensive care unit, because he hasn’t been registered, because he is intubated and in a coma. How will they know that he is Arthur Brodard?“

She has widely shared a picture of her 16-year-old son, showing a boy with a young face and brown hair swept across his forehead.

One of his friends, who was sitting with him, managed to get out, but was left with burns over 45 per cent of his body, Mrs Brodard said.

“He is in the intensive care unit in Zurich,” she said, choking back tears.

Swiss authorities warned it could take days to identify everyone who perished.

“We provided the DNA... We were asked to provide (descriptions of) the clothing, but as we saw in the latest videos, there are no clothes” left, she said, after clothing was burned off the victims’ bodies.

“So, there’s only DNA, and we know that DNA takes time,” she said.

‘They showed us a toe’

On the morning of Jan 2, she said she had an appointment at “the parents’ centre” – an emergency unit set up by the authorities.

But, she said, “they are very careful with the information they give to the parents, so as not to give us false hope, which is understandable”.

What was distressing, she said, was to be told in the morning there were four unidentified people who were alive, but then at an afternoon press conference “the number had changed: it was now six”.

In the confusion, Mrs Brodard said that she was trying to find information on her own, with the cooperation of other parents of missing children.

She had gone to the CHUV hospital in Lausanne, because someone told her they had seen her son in the intensive care ward there. But it was a false lead.

“Arthur’s father was in Bern last night, until 2am, to have the thumb checked. They showed us a toe. I received a photo of a toe, and they asked me: is this your son?”

Glimmer of hope

Mrs Brodard said she did not blame the authorities.

“They are doing what they can, given this tragic situation... But we now need to know where our children are.

“And if we have to find him ourselves, then we’ll go to every hospital where they tell us that perhaps one of our children are,” she said.

Mrs Brodard insisted she was prepared to “seize every glimmer of hope”.

“But don’t leave us like this for so long,” she said.

“If he’s in the morgue, I want to be by his side, (and) if he’s in intensive care... it’s my place to be by his side.”

“It’s not my place to be here.” AFP