Freak incident in Moruga

WHAT started out as a prank ended in tragedy when schoolboy Odelle Cooper accidentally hanged himself with a length of antenna wire at his Moruga home on Wednesday.

The 16-year-old was found hanging in the downstairs section of his Church Street, Sixth Company Village home by his horrified mother Wendy Cooper.

The boy — the fifth of eight children — was a Form Two pupil of the Princes Town Junior Secondary School.

Cooper was helping his mother wash clothes outside the family’s small wooden house around 2.30 pm.

As the woman was busy picking up clothes from a line under the house, she missed her son but paid no attention. She continued her washing.

It was when she went downstairs to hang another batch of clothes that she discovered her son hanging from a rafter. A police report stated that Cooper used a piece of wood to stand on after wrapping the antenna around his neck. It is believed that he lost his balance and slipped.

Still in a state of shock, the grieving mother told Newsday she found him gasping for breath and she held him up in an effort to get him to breathe. She added that with the help of neighbours, they got him down from the rafter and he was still breathing.

Cooper said she thought her son would have survived as he was whisked away to the Princes Town District Hospital.

She however remained adamant that his son’s death was not a suicide but rather a freak incident.

“I know my son and he was not one to willfully hang himself.

In fact, he could not have waited to see the friendly football match between the Trinidad and Tobago Soca Warriors and Peru later in the evening,” Cooper said. Recalling the discovery, Cooper said, “I just dropped the basket of clothes and ran screaming towards him. I wrapped my arms around him to try and lift him up so that he won’t strangle himself anymore.

With help from neighbours we were able to loosen the wire.”

The grieving woman, trying to explain what would have caused her son to place the wire around his neck while balancing another length of wire, said she believed he was trying to give her a shock by pretending that he had hanged himself.

“That was the type of person he was.

Always doing something out of the ordinary, either to scare us so that he could get a laugh out of it or to make us laugh. He was that way both at school and at home.”

Vice-principal of Princes Town Junior Secondary School Diann Ali-Boodan described Cooper as one that kept his class alive with his boisterous antics and pranks. She said classmates broke down in tears on the news of his death yesterday.