Babbs Mill Lake, in the Kingfisher Country Park in Kingshurst, Solihull is normally a place for leisure, fun and recreation, but it became the site of a horrifying tragedy just twelve months ago. Four boys visiting the lake and playing here, a few short weeks before christmas, lost their lives when harmless fun took a turn for the worst.
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00:00 I opened my phone and there was a tweet from the police saying that people were in trouble
00:07 in open water. So it was a big, you know, immediately I knew this was going to be a
00:11 big incident.
00:12 On Sunday 11th December 2022, four children visiting the lake to feed the ducks and skim
00:18 stones fell through ice formed on the surface of the water. The temperature at the time
00:22 was around 1 degrees Celsius, even colder in the lake. Emergency services were called
00:27 around 2.30pm and a huge search and rescue mission was launched to find the two brothers,
00:32 their cousin and their friend, who plunged into the freezing waters.
00:36 My name's Area Manager Martin Ward-White with West Midlands Fire Service and for the Babsmill
00:42 Lake incident I was the incident commander that came on and took over from the initial
00:48 incident commander. Prior to our arrival there were members of the public on scene, although
00:53 they were very limited in terms of what they could do. So obviously when the fire service
00:58 arrived along with police colleagues and ambulance colleagues, we kind of took over the scene
01:04 then.
01:05 The incident, as it unfolded, soon became of national importance, drawing the attention
01:10 of the entire country as the search continued and updates were still coming in thick and
01:15 fast. One of the most heart-wrenching details, and perhaps the one that put the story on
01:19 so many radars, three of the boys entered the lake in a bid to save the life of the
01:24 first. Eight-year-old Finley Butler was the first to fall into the frozen depths here,
01:29 Birmingham Coroner's Court was later told. Fin's younger brother Sam, aged six, their
01:33 cousin Thomas Stewart, eleven, and friend Jack Johnson, aged ten, rushed towards the
01:38 danger to help, said police.
01:41 News kept flooding in so quickly, there was a lot of social media posts, it was like people,
01:46 you know, they'd been filming the boys, I think they'd been ringing 999 calls and I
01:50 think it was just an urgent plea really for anybody to come and help to rescue them. Later
01:56 we heard that the police were on the scene, that they'd, you know, wanted to try to smash
02:01 through the ice to reach them, they'd formed a human chain to get to the boys, to, you
02:06 know, to do what they could to save them.
02:08 And usually we would operate within a 90-minute period, however I don't think there was an
02:14 appetite after 90 minutes to stop searching, so we carried on in very arduous conditions
02:20 and very cold and freezing conditions, the crews carried on, on and in the water for
02:26 three hours in the end.
02:28 All four boys were rushed to Heartland's and Birmingham Children's Hospitals, but the following
02:32 day, the 12th of December, saw the news confirm that three of the children had died. It was
02:37 announced on the 14th of December that the fourth child had died in hospital. An inquest
02:41 on the 6th of July this year confirmed their deaths were accidental and attributed the
02:45 cause to drowning.
02:47 I think anybody who worked on that story, they were here, you know, it was just so upsetting,
02:52 it's such a tragedy, just, you know, four young boys, you know, they were trying to
02:57 save each other and they just didn't make it, it was just awful.
03:00 [BLANK_AUDIO]