A family and their entire town are mourning the unexpected loss of a 9-year-old child.
In an interview with WLKY, Larue County Sheriff Russell McCoy explained that Charlene “Charlie” Sipes passed away on her 9th birthday after she hit a curb while riding her bike near her Hodgenville, Kentucky home.
Larue County investigators say Sipes passed away after the handlebars of her bicycle severed a major artery in her neck during the wreck. As WDRB reports, Sipes’ mother, Tiffany Fischer, discovered her daughter on the rural road following the accident and carried her daughter back to their home where she was pronounced dead.
The Larue County coroner described her passing as a “freak accident” to People.
Thank you all for your thoughts and prayers. My little girl left us yesterday.It was her 9th birthday. We got to…
Posted by Tiffany Fischer on Wednesday, 18 September 2019
The day after the September 17 accident, Tiffany took to Facebook to publicly express her grief:
Thank you all for your thoughts and prayers.
My little girl left us yesterday.
It was her 9th birthday. We got to experience life with Charlie for nine years exactly. Nine short years.
My baby. My little girl. I have never been so broken in my life.
You never think it would happen to you. Until it does. And now, I don’t want to go on. She was my life. My best friend.
Tiffany continued saying her little girl would be laid to rest on September 20:
I never thought I would have to write that.
I never thought I would have to live with out my Charlie.
I love you more, baby.
The mother continued in a separate post:
This isn’t supposed to be real. It’s supposed to be a dream. I’m going to wake up and it’s all a nightmare. My beautiful baby. My smart and loving and funny baby.
She was so funny. She loved to laugh. She loved to make other people laugh. She had the stars in her eyes and such big dreams. Big big dreams. I don’t want to do this without you, baby. I don’t know how to do this without you. You were the sun. You were my stars. My everything.
I love you more, baby.
A GoFundMe account has since been set up by friends of Tiffany’s family to help raise money to aid with the cost of the unexpected funeral.
The friend wrote on the website:
“I remember when [Charlie] was around 3 and she pushed a chair to the cabinet, grabbed a cup and poured a glass of milk by her self and Tiffany looked at me with tears in her eyes because ‘her baby wasn’t a baby anymore.’ Little did Tiffany know, that was just the first sign that Charlie was an independent, headstrong kid!”