A 6-year-old girl died this week after succumbing to head trauma caused by the errant shaft of a badminton racket during a family vacation in Maine, police said.
The girl, identified as Lucy Morgan of Stockholm, New Jersey, died Wednesday at Maine Medical Center in Portland after the June 1 afternoon crash in Limerick, about 30 miles (48 kilometers) west of Portland, Maine State Police said.
According to police and her father’s accounts, the siblings were playing badminton in the front yard of a lakeside cottage in Limerick when she was struck.
The father, Jesse Morgan, is the minister of worship and discipleship at Green Pond Bible Chapel in Newfoundland, New Jersey. He wrote about what happened to Lucy on a blog associated with the non-denominational institution.
He said the family had finished lunch and he was in the back of the cottage with his wife when they heard screaming from the front.
“A freak accident involving a racket that broke on a downward swing had lodged a sharp piece in Lucy’s skull while she was sitting on the sidelines, causing catastrophic injury,” he wrote. “She was still breathing but unresponsive as I held her [her mother] Bethany cries out to God.”
State police said the “aluminum shaft of a badminton racket became loose from the wooden handle, causing the shaft to strike the girl in the head and puncture her skull.”
Lucy was taken to MaineHealth Maine Medical Center in Sanford before being moved by helicopter to Maine Medical Center in Portland, they said.
Jesse Morgan wrote that Lucy suffered from hypoxic-ischemic encephalopathy, oxygen-deprived brain damage that can be caused by traumatic injury. By Wednesday, he said, it seemed clear she wasn’t coming back.
“Given the initial trauma that caused the global hypoxic brain injury she suffered, and the severity of the swelling, it was almost certain that she had suffered brain death,” Morgan wrote.
She was pronounced dead that morning, he said.
It was not immediately clear whether Maine’s Office of Chief Medical Examiner was conducting an autopsy or had an autopsy scheduled. Spokespeople there were working on a response to a request for information.
Morgan wrote about how Lucy’s death deeply affected her mother and their three other children, a four-year-old boy, an eight-year-old girl and a ten-year-old boy.
“Shiloh broke down immediately,” the pastor wrote of the 8-year-old. “She and Lucy are best friends because they are the middle girls.”
The “disaster” tested his faith, Morgan wrote.
“We were ready to make war on all of you by raging against the darkness,” he said.
An outpouring of support, including visits from family members and other church leaders and congregants, donations of food and flowers, as well as expressions of support from some of the tens of thousands of people who read the pastor’s accounts, were reminders of God’s goodwill. wrote the pastor.
“Like gold at the bottom of a deep, dark pit there was and is evidence of God’s grace in this utter tragedy. We just had to be willing to go into the depths to see it,” he said.
Green Pond Bible Chapel will hold a funeral service for Lucy on June 15.
“My wish is that her story is one of hope,” Morgan told NBC News on Friday. “Even though the worst has happened, it has helped others.”
This article was originally published on NBCNews.com
