Little Zara Skye and her mother, Carly Wowk, were both taking a nap one afternoon in November, 2015. Carly’s daughter had been sleeping in a portable soft cot insert.
But the mother woke to the screams of her partner, who found 2-month-old Zara had turned blue.
“The pain in his cry was undeniable and he brought her into the lounge room. He held her in such a way as if to say ‘look at her’,” Carly told Daily Mail Australia.
“He was screaming, then I started screaming, I flipped the table because it was a quicker route and ran up to them.”
Zara was no longer breathing. Carly instructed her partner to perform CPR and the ambulance arrived four minutes later.
“I honestly expected them to fix her 100 per cent. There wasn’t a tiny part of me that thought she was going to die – it was a complete shock,” the mother explained.
According to 7 News, the little girl’s brain had been deprived of oxygen for approximately two hours.
Autopsy results confirmed Zara’s cause of death was SIDS asphyxiation.
Carly said her daughter had rolled onto her stomach, moved to the corner of her cot insert and suffocated inside of it.
Carly opened up out about her daughter’s tragic death on the Facebook page, “Awareness for Zara Skye” to speak out about the potential hazards of cot inserts. She also announced she had given birth to a third child, a “beautiful little girl” named Charlotte Hope in January.
“You never think it’s going to happen to you and I didn’t know it was suffocation hazard. If I hadn’t have used it I would have had a two-year-old walking around,” she told the Mail Online.
“I wasn’t able to save her and there’s nothing on this earth I would have loved more to have done that. I can’t, but there are kids out there I might be able to in her name.”
Red Nose, a charity that aims to eradicate sudden infant death syndrome, recommends keeping pillows, doonas and cot bumpers out of cots.
You can read more about safe sleeping here.
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