An English girl died in a freak mishap after a branch hidden in the mud pierced her heart as she played with her friends, according to reports.
Lilly Angel Rodgers, 11, was doing a “commando crawl” with her pals in a muddy bank when a concealed pointy branch suddenly pierced through her ribs at Wacker Quay near Plymouth, Cornwall Live reported.
The preteen from Newton Abbot was an active girl who loved surfing, climbing, camping, and paddle-boarding before the tragic accident on a summer’s day, the outlet said.
The night before, Rodgers stayed up late at a friend’s house. The following day, she ventured to the mud flats with two friends, their mother and their mother’s partner, an inquest into her death on Monday revealed.
While the mother and her partner prepared barbecue, the three children slid down the mud bank and “played starfish” in the adults’ line of sight, the mother told investigators.
Rodgers was sliding headfirst down the mud bank near a river channel when the branch impaled her — causing her to stand up, grab her chest, and gasp before collapsing into the mud.
The children’s mother and her partner tried to reach Rodgers in the mud before another adult arrived and emergency responders arrived at the scene.
The pointy branch had severed the youngster’s pulmonary artery, causing her heart to stop.
Rodgers had to be airlifted to dry land to receive CPR, and it took roughly 40 minutes for her to arrive back to shore from the mudflats, the outlet reported.
Dr James Garvican, a consultant pathologist at the Royal Cornwall Hospital who did Rodgers’ autopsy, told the inquest her cause of death was “penetrating chest trauma”.
“It’s extremely bad luck. Half an inch to the right and it would just have glanced off her ribcage and left a bruise and a scratch. Half an inch to the left and it may still have gone in, but it would not have damaged vital organs. This was not a survivable injury,” Garvican said.
Andrew Cox, senior coroner for Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly, concluded that her death was accidental.
“Whatever Lilly fell on caused the wound found at the postmortem and resulted in her death,” Cox said, according to the outlet.
“There was nothing suspicious. In the circumstances it was the most truly, desperately and unlikely accident. Lilly slid on a branch with a sharp point that had been covered by the mud.”
“Lilly and her friends had played many times before in that location. She was being watched over by adults who had made sure she stayed within their line of sight,” he said.
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