Police say a 12-year-old New York boy who was playing in a snowbank with a friend died Tuesday after he was buried in the snow.
It was supposed to be a regular winter day: the boy and his friend were getting ready to build snow tunnels and forts, dressed in warm jackets, snow pants and boots.
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Upstate New York recently had their first big snowfall of the season and snow removal trucks were getting ready to plow the streets.
“Both of these boys had tunnelled into a snow bank on the back side where nobody would have seen them,” Greenwich-Cambridge Chief of Police, George G. Bell told Global News.
Although the incident in Greenwich — about 70 km’s north Albany — is still under investigation, Bell believes the boys were buried by the snow dumped by a plow.
“Kids need to be educated on the dangers. It can happen to any one of these kids.”
He warns parents to tell their children about the risks of digging tunnels near roadways.
“Be aware of the consequences. A 12-year-old child — two weeks before Christmas — is gone because of this. It was a tragic accident.”
Police found the two boys with the help of a K-9 unit after they were reported missing by the family.
Police desperately shovelled about seven tons of snow in 10 minutes and found one boy unresponsive and the other conscious about an hour later.
“The survivor tells us that at some point he sees the village dump truck coming, doesn’t pay a lot of attention, doesn’t figure it’s coming down there, but it’s a 12-year-old boy, what does he know,” Bell said.
“He then says he hears the beeping sound … and then he says, ‘It all goes dark.'”
The unresponsive boy was rushed to Saratoga Hospital, where he was pronounced dead.
The other boy who was found conscious and alert, was treated for hypothermia but is now in stable condition, Bell said.
READ MORE: Snowplow operators ask to keep children from digging tunnels near roads
It’s a snow plow operator’s worst nightmare, the constant fear of accidentally burying a child at play while they’re trying to widen the streets, one operator said.
“It’s always on your mind,” Nathan Orr, a snowplow operator in New Brunswick told Global News last winter.
“Kids playing in snowbanks is a big issue.”
–With files from the Associated Press and Shelley Steeves, Global News.
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