Warning: Distressing content.
A heartbroken US couple has shared their tragic story of losing their twin four-year-olds, Kellan and Aurora after they crawled into a toy chest to “fall asleep”.
Their older brother Axton opened the toy box in the morning to find his siblings with their arms wrapped around each other in the wooden toy box.
The brother informed his parents, telling them that his siblings, Kellan and Aurora were “sleeping” and “being silly”.
The twin’s devastated mum, Sadie Myers shared the terrible news of the loss of their twins on Facebook with an urgent warning to other parents to destroy all toy chests.
The twins often slept in strange places
On Friday night, Kellan and Aurora were tucked into their bed as usual by dad, Don Starr while mum, Sadie was at work. When Sadie arrived home, she checked on the twins who were asleep in their beds, and went to bed herself.
In the morning as everyone woke up, the family noticed the twins were not up yet. The family started to panic when they noticed their beds were empty. That’s when big brother Axton found them.
Not many will know the pain of losing two children at the same time and losing them in a way that makes no sense,” Sadie wrote in a heart-wrenching Facebook post.
“But I have to believe that something in this universe chose them specifically, maybe to protect them from some future tragedy, or maybe because their souls were too perfect for this world.”
As Sadie explains, she would often find her four-year-old twins sleeping in strange positions and in strange places.
At some point early that morning the twins woke each other up and decided they wanted to play in their room rather than sleep. They do this a lot, it’s just a twin thing I guess.
They usually fall asleep in some weird place in their room … Friday night the weird place they decided to snuggle up and go back to sleep was in their cedar toy chest, that we use to store all their stuffed animals.
They laid inside head to toe, with one arm each over their twin.”
Tragically, the wooden chest must have closed while the twins slept, rendering it soundproof and completely airtight.
So as they slept, all snuggled up together, they slowly ran out of oxygen within a couple of hours and passed away. They never even knew it was happening. There was no sudden gasp for air, it was a very slow transition from sleep to passing on.”
‘Sleeping in the toy box’
Sadie explains the gut-wrenching moment when she realised the next morning that something wasn’t right. Her two older children were both awake and playing outside. When Don went to check on the twins, he couldn’t find them and the family started to panic.
We all immediately started panicking, yelling for them, turning the house upside down, yelling up and down the street.
“Then Axton said ‘Mommy I found them! They are so silly just sleeping in the toy box’.
“I ran in to check and within a few seconds I knew something wasn’t right, but I also quickly realised it was already too late.”
‘Twins full of laughter, silliness, dancing, silly questions and funny faces, games and jokes, happiness and love’
There are no words to describe this absolutely horrific tragedy and our heart breaks for Don, Sadie, and their older boys.
Sadie shares that the family will be attending family therapy and has pleaded with other parents to “destroy” any toy chests to prevent this tragedy from happening to other families.
It makes no sense to me and never will. I hope knowing this helps in some way, and I hope if you have a toy box like this that you destroy it immediately! Please keep me and my family in your hearts and prayers, because this will never get easier for us.
We were so very lucky to get the gift of having the twins with us for even a short time, because they changed us all for the better and brought sooo much light and love into our lives.
Every second with those twins was full of laughter, silliness, dancing, silly questions and funny faces, games and jokes, happiness and love. We will cherish those memories and always celebrate the twins and we will carry their memory with us in all we do.”
Sadie’s sister has also set up a GoFundMe account to help with the funeral costs. We are sending this family all the strength in the world. The twins’ funeral service is scheduled for 15 September 2023.
If you do have a large wooden toy box in your house, please consider removing it or taking the lid off so this sort of awful tragedy doesn’t happen again. This is also something that can happen in large eskies as well as washing machines/dryers.
