Searchers find body of missing girl submerged in water near family boat
KEMAH — The waters at the Kemah Boardwark Marina were flat and calm Thursday, the sky muggy and bright at Dock H, as carny rides whirred away just a few hundred yards away.
But the day before, it had been the site of a frantic search for little Fiona “Kitty” Carroll, who disappeared at the marina with her father as he worked on the family’s sailboat.
On Wednesday night, helicopters with spotlights traced up and down the rows of sailboats as members of dive teams from the Galveston County Sheriff’s Office combed the area’s waters looking for the 5-year-old.
Around 9 a.m. Thursday, with the help of Texas Equusearch, authorities found the little girl’s body submerged in the water under a dock by their boat.
“I wish we had better news,” Tim Miller, Texas Equusearch’s CEO, told reporters shortly after her body was discovered.
The precise details of how she slipped away and drowned are still unclear, but she is believed to have fallen in the water while her father was working on the craft.
The family, who moved from Katy to a three-story home on the east side of the city, had bought a sailboat several years ago, which they had been fixing up and were planning to use for sailing trips to the Caribbean and South Pacific this year.
They spent years restoring the 42-foot craft, often traveling to Kemah on the weekends, before eventually moving there to work on it more consistently, according to Keith Boyett, Kitty’s uncle. The family had planned to spend a year sailing through the Caribbean and other locales, he said.
On her blog, Cidnie Carroll, Kitty’s mother, wrote extensively about buying the boat with her husband, Mark, in 2009, and the painstaking process they had gone through to refurbish it and make it seaworthy.
Their daughter — and Kitty’s older sister, Maura — shared that enthusiasm, she wrote, often posting pictures of the girls in the boat, or of Kitty drawing pirate treasure maps or playing around.
“Kitty loved working with tools, on the boat,” Boyett said. “She loved being on the boat with her dad.”
That’s what his brotherin-law and niece were doing Wednesday, he said. They’d just walked over from their home, a few blocks away.
It was commonplace for Kitty to wear a life jacket when she was at the marina, her uncle said.
“Ninety-nine percent of the time, even when they were on the dock, she’d have on a (personal flotation device), but they’d just gotten there,” Boyett said.
After her disappearance, neighbors wondered if she’d been kidnapped.
It wasn’t until Thursday morning, with the help of Texas Equusearch using special sonar equipment, that authorities found her body in the depths near the slip where her family had moored their boat, the “Ceol Mor.”
As family and friends gathered at the Carroll home, news of the discovery rippled through Kemah, shocking many members of this small, tight-knit town of just over 3,000 residents.
Greg Rikard, the city’s police chief, said he could not remember a drowning in Kemah in at least 15 years.
“I’m just devastated,” said Kathy Clark, at Kemah Hardware, located on Highway 146 on the main strip leading into town.
The spunky girl with shoulder-length blonde hair and a big grin had captured the hearts of the store’s employees, who’d often slipped her candy or let her roam around the store.
“She had free rein of the place,” said store owner Toni Randall.
On Wednesday, Kitty had come in with her dad, shortly before the fatal events later that day.
She had a drawing of a sheep with her, remembered Jeff Graham, another employee. He teased her, told her it looked like a goat.
“Goats have horns,” Kitty shot back. “This doesn’t have horns.”
At Christmas, when Kitty and her father had biked over to the store, Randall and her staff had given her a bag of popcorn almost as big as she was. Kitty had taken cookies for the employees.
She also loved chasing Tilley, the store’s blackand-white cat, and playing the boss in Randall’s office in the back of the store.
“She was our little hardware queen,” Randall said.