Mother and Child Die After Falling from Ferry

(RepublicanDaily.org) – An investigation is ongoing after the death of a seven-year-old Polish child and his mother who were traveling on a ferry from Poland to Sweden. According to reports, the young boy and his mother fell around 65 feet into the water below while onboard the Stena Spirit as it steamed from Gdynia, Poland, to Karlskrona, Sweden. The incident occurred around halfway through the nine-hour trip in the Baltic Sea.

Witnesses aboard the vessel looked on in alarm as the small boy fell from the ship followed by his mother. Around 310 passengers were aboard the voyage from Poland to Sweden, which stopped after the fall was discovered and the ship responded. Rescue teams arrived about one hour later to save the two individuals. Attempts to revive the mother and her son failed and Polish police reported that both are deceased.

NATO ships and rescue craft were deployed, but the woman and boy were reportedly “unresponsive” when being given First Aid and were pronounced dead after being airlifted to the hospital in Karlskrona. Ship spokeswoman Agnieszka Zembrzycka said the company operating Stena Spirit is cooperating fully and has “no information whether this was due to a malfunction of the ferry.”

The case is currently being investigated as a homicide in order to deploy full resources to discover what happened. The boy, Lech, was reportedly in a wheelchair according to some witnesses of the tragic event. Polish police recently provided an update that the case is being investigated as a murder-suicide in which the mother Paulina pushed her son off the ship and then jumped in after him to end her life. This calls into question the initial reports that Paulina jumped in to save her young son, as CCTV surveillance cameras show the single mother possibly involved in the deliberate murder of her young son.

The Stena Spirit had high guardrails that would have prevented the boy from falling over by accident, and no reports of rough seas or unusual conditions are reported at the time of the plunge.