Barbie scooter terrified mother in frantic search for her toddler

A PINK Barbie scooter lying abandoned on the ground struck terror in the heart of a mother searching frantically for her missing toddler.

Nineteen-month-old Aileen Goldman had been spotted by her mother, Olga, playing with the scooter of a neighbour’s child just minutes before she disappeared.

When her mother found her a short time later, she was floating in the water, in a low-tide inlet, just 300 yards from her parent’s home.

At the inquest yesterday into the toddler’s death, the court heard the little girl had gone out to play on the morning of May 11, 2005, after 8am.

“I dressed my daughter and... after breakfast, my daughter went out with some bread to feed the neighbour’s dog,” Olga said, in a statement read out by Sgt Mick McGuire.

Fifteen minutes later, Olga spotted her daughter on a footpath nearby, playing with the scooter.

The next time she looked, which was “approximately five minutes, but not more than seven minutes later,” there was no sign of Aileen.

“We always kept a very close watch on our daughter,” Olga said in her statement, because they live at 1 Kilnamona, Sherkin Island, which is close to the sea and the entrance to their estate is without a gate.

“I immediately ran to the ocean,” Olga said, spotting the pink scooter on the way.

“I was terrified.” With no sign of her daughter, she ran to a low wall nearby. Then she noticed a piece of the seabank, next to the lagoon near their home, had fallen into the water.

“I looked into the water and saw my daughter,” Olga said. “I immediately jumped in.”

The couple, Russian, both carried out CPR in an attempt to resuscitate their child. Sergei, a doctor, succeeded in reviving his daughter. They were taken by ferry to Baltimore where a doctor and ambulance awaited and Aileen was brought to Bantry Hospital before being transferred later that day to the paediatric unit of Cork University Hospital.

Later that evening, she was pronounced dead.

Garda Pat Dolan, from Skibbereen, told the court that on May 12, he had examined the scene where Aileen had been found in the water.

Assistant State pathologist Dr Margaret Bolster carried out the post mortem. Her report said Aileen was likely to have been in the water for five to ten minutes.

Yesterday, coroner Philip Comyn recorded a verdict of accidental death.

The Russian couple had only moved to Sherkin Island, off the west coast of Cork, in the past few years. They have two teenage children.