Missouri boys, 7 and 8, drown in icy pond after going for a bike ride days before Christmas, family devastated
ST CLAIR, MISSOURI: Two young boys have reportedly died after drowning in a pond over the weekend.
Cleveland 'CJ' Hicks, 7, and Terrance Hicks, 8, raised concerns after they went for a bike ride together on December 22 and didn't return home when they were supposed to. Authorities later found the brothers had gone to a pond on a private property in St Clair, Missouri, per local news outlet KMOV.
According to the report, family members went searching for the boys that afternoon when one of them found the younger sibling floating in the pond.
Terrance was found shortly after by rescue divers and the brothers were rushed to a nearby hospital, where they were pronounced dead.
Speaking to CNN, Sheriff Steven Pelton said he believed one of them had probably slipped into the freezing water before the other tried to rescue him.
In a conversation with KMOV, neighbor Opal Kamper recalled how she often spoke to the boys when they were outside playing or on their way to school. According to her, their untimely deaths are “going to be hard to get over for a long time".
“They would stop by in the evenings and visit with me and I would always give them a hug and they would hug me,” she said. “I would always say ‘I love ya.’ I told them, ‘I love you,’ they knew I loved them.”
The tragic incident came just days ahead of Christmas, proving to be all the more heartbreaking for the family.
“I had their Christmas gifts ready for them,” 93-year-old Kamper said. “And I thought, ‘Oh, I won’t get to give it to them.'”
Speaking to KWCH, St Clair Fire Protection District Chief Craig Sullivan warned that the thickness of ice on ponds can be difficult to gauge amid warming temperatures.
“Ice is not safe until you have approximately 4 to 5 inch thick ice,” he said, “and with the weather temperatures we’ve been experiencing, we have not had a long stretch of extremely cold weather to thicken that ice.”