On Monday, November 5, 2018, the funeral worker proceeded to open the coffin for exhumation, it was empty. Early in the morning, when the cemetery was not yet open to the public, Debbie O'Brien, the marble worker, the funeral operators, François de Gerbreville, a journalist to the Quotidien du Nord, and the police officer had gathered around the grave of her deceased daughter's child.

Two years earlier, nineteen-year-old Abby O'Brien from Manchester had aroused the curiosity of François de Gerbreville, who had dedicated a short article to her in the village gazette. He described her as a person who, following an unwanted pregnancy, had wished to terminate it early enough for everything to go smoothly. Unfortunately, the surgical procedure had been postponed several times for administrative reasons, and her request had finally been refused because the legal time limit had been exceeded. Her mother knew full well that if she gave birth on English soil, the baby would be taken away from her daughter as soon as she left the maternity ward by social services, on the grounds of "suspicion of future abuse". She had saved up the little money she had to allow her to give birth overseas. The tragic end of the young girl shocked the inhabitants of this quiet town in the Nord-Pas-de-Calais region, who identified with the young mother fleeing from the English social services.