A 2 ½-year-old girl died on Monday morning after she wandered outside her family’s Maple Street apartment in subzero temperatures and couldn’t make it back inside.
Newport Police Chief Jim Burroughs said the girl’s death is not considered suspicious and the situation “appears to be a bad accident.”
“For reasons that are unknown and probably will never be known, in the middle of the night, she decided to go outside and then wasn’t able to get back in,” Burroughs said on Monday. “At this time, the accident remains under investigation by the Newport Police Department and the Sullivan County Attorney’s Office.”
Neighbors alerted the family to the situation around 7 a.m. after they found the girl lifeless at the bottom of a set of stairs off a porch near a back apartment at 10 Maple Street.
Ambulance personnel responded, but it was too late.
“Sofia was the happiest and smartest toddler you would have ever met,” her mother, Courtney Van Schoick, said on Monday. “She’s so loved and missed.”
The Van Schoick family had recently moved to Newport from Claremont. This past weekend was their first one in town, and the girl was unfamiliar with her surroundings, her grandfather, Lindsay Van Schoick, said stoically as he stood on the porch just feet from where his granddaughter was found.
Sofia, a twin, was a “precocious” girl who lit up every room, he said. It was likely Sofia’s curiosity that led her to the front door sometime early Monday morning.
The family will never know why Sofia, who was wearing only pajamas at the time, wasn’t able to make it back inside, he said.
“She was the sweetest little thing,” Lindsay Van Schoick said, his eyes welling. “…The biggest blue eyes I’d ever seen.”
The family was alerted to the situation by Shane Rowe and Stephanie MacIntyre, who live next door at 14 Maple Street.
MacIntyre awoke around 4 a.m. to the sounds of a child crying, but after looking outside and not seeing anything, the pair tried to go back to sleep. They assumed it could be an upset child in a downstairs unit of their apartment building, Rowe said.
Around 6 a.m., Rowe and MacIntyre woke their children for the day and about an hour later, MacIntyre went outside to start their cars. It was after that that Rowe looked out his second-story window and saw the tragedy.
“I said to her, I hope to hell that that’s a doll,” Rowe said. “She ran down frantically and found her.”
A family member scooped up Sofia and brought her inside.
Temperatures on Sunday night into Monday morning reached about 7 degrees below zero. An autopsy is pending.
“It’s a life gone to soon,” Lindsay Van Schoick said, “way too soon.”