Parents struggle to cope with loss of son

THE parents of four-year-old Karl Fox, who was killed in a freak accident at his school last week, are struggling to come to terms with the loss, the local parish priest, Fr Michael Hogan, said yesterday.

Karl, the second youngest of five children, was strangled when the hood of his jacket got caught in a bathroom window at Feakle National School.

It is though that the junior infant had wandered unnoticed into the school before it was locked last Tuesday evening and was trying to get out through the window.

Gardaí will continue their investigation into the child’s death this week in order to establish exactly what happened.

It was Karl’s older brother, Gavin, 11, who found the little boy hanging from the window at the back of the school.

Gavin was involved in hurling practice last Tuesday evening. After returning home and discovering that Karl was not there, he immediately headed back to the school and started looking for him.

His mother Linda said Karl was always out playing from the time he got up until the time he went to bed so it was not at all unusual that he had not come home from school. When he was not on his toy tractor or playing with his toy cars, he would be out hurling, she said in an interview over the weekend.

“Gavin came back from hurling and after a while, we started to wonder where Karl was. We presumed he was still playing in the hurling field. Gavin went looking for him and found him hanging from the window at the school,” she said.

Gavin took Karl down and carried him to the roadway where he managed to flag down a motorist who gave them a lift to their home. An ambulance was called but it was too late.

Linda recalled how much Karl loved school: “He used to skip up the path to school so early that he would be there before the teachers.”

The family moved to Feakle from Dublin four years ago

Fr Hogan, who officiated at the boy’s funeral, said the local community had been very shaken by the tragedy and had reached out to Karl’s parents to support them through their terrible grief.