Toddler tragedy: a mother's brave crusade after losing her little girl
Little Indy Lee was just three years old when she was tragically killed after a sandstone war memorial toppled onto her. A year on, her grieving mother has found a very special way to honour her memory, as Leigh Reinhold reports.
It was a beautiful late spring evening and a party atmosphere was in the air as Tamica Harrower watched her giggling children and their little friends chase each other around the greens of the Black Head Bowling Club. The family group got together on the NSW mid-north coast last year for Tamica’s mother’s purple-themed 50th birthday celebration and had just settled in with their first drinks, enjoying the chance to relax after a hectic afternoon of party preparations.
Tamica, 30, and her partner, Robbie Bishop, 32, and some of the other parents purposely chose a table where they could observe their children play and make sure they were behaving themselves.
“The kids were running this way and that and laughing and having so much fun,” says Tamica. “I remember telling them not to run on the greens with their shoes on. We had only been there 20 minutes so they were full of energy.”
Then, in what seemed like a split second, that wonderful childish laughter echoing through the surrounding gum trees suddenly turned to screams of pure terror. “There were signs around the greens saying to be on the lookout for snakes,” says Tamica, speaking for the first time since giving her police statement in January about the evening of November 26, 2016. “I thought the kids must have seen a snake. I could never imagine what had actually happened.”
A large memorial to fallen Diggers in the gardens of the bowling club, the words “Lest We Forget” inscribed on it, had tumbled off its plinth, trapping three-year-old Indy Lee, Tamica’s precious 14kg baby girl, beneath 500kg of sandstone. It took four men to lift the stone and Tamica’s stepson Bradley, 14, was the one who heroically pulled his little sister free.
“I heard my 12-year-old daughter Keira just screaming erratically and yelling, ‘Mum, it’s Indy!” says Tamica, the pain still raw in her voice. “I kicked off my shoes and it probably took me about 10 steps to get to her.
“I didn’t know the stone had fallen on top of Indy. She had been pulled free by the time I got to her. I just thought she was knocked out. I was holding her, yelling at her to wake up.” While the panicked group waited for an ambulance, urgent efforts were made by partygoers to revive Indy. Meanwhile, knowing the true extent of Indy’s injuries, Tamica’s mother, Shiralee, collapsed and a second ambulance was called. Tamica went into shock, unable to process the unfolding nightmare.
The paramedics worked frantically on Indy in the ambulance but by the time they had arrived at Manning Base Hospital there was no hope and the light of her mother’s life was pronounced dead. “I made it known at the time, that if it hadn’t been for my other children, I would have killed myself that day,” admits Tamica, who collapsed in the hospital waiting room when a nurse broke the devastating news to her that her baby was gone.
An inspirational little fighter
Now scrolling through the photos on her phone of a pigtailed, smiling Indy, wearing a Frozen dress and steel-capped boots and cuddling a stuffed bear, Tamica tells the story of the “little terror” who changed her life.