Halloween Hayride Kills Toddler

Oklahoma hayride victim was 'little angel'
MOTHER TRIED TO SAVE HER YOUNG DAUGHTER AFTER FALL FROM TRAILER

BY MICHAEL KIMBALL

Published: October 27, 2008

Zoe Madeline Montgomery, 18 months old, was too happy to ever be sad. Sadness scared her.

When she saw someone cry, Zoe would run to her mom and dad for a hug and to be reassured everyone would be happy again soon.

"That’s why I’m trying to be strong,” Zoe’s mother, Moore resident Carrie Montgomery, said Sunday afternoon.

"I know she would not want us crying. She wanted everyone to be happy like her. She didn’t know what it was like to be sad.”

Hayride goes wrong

Friday night, Carrie Montgomery started to get off the back of a trailer on a hayride at Orr Family Farm in Oklahoma City while Zoe stayed onboard, waiting to be lifted safely into her mom’s arms.

But the trailer jerked suddenly, sending Zoe flying to the ground near the wheels, her mother said.

Carrie Montgomery, 24, threw herself at her daughter, tearing skin on her leg on the trailer as she tried to save Zoe before the wheels rolled over her. Zoe was airlifted to OU Medical Center, where doctors pronounced her dead.

But Carrie and her husband, Zoe’s father Shane, 28, made a lifetime of memories with their daughter in the year and a half they shared. Zoe’s irrepressible joy, her love of music and dancing and even her "stinky feet” endeared the toddler to everyone who knew her, they said.

‘If she were still here’

Shane, a security guard and jack-of-all-trades musician, loved to watch Zoe strum his guitar, which is decked out in stickers she liked. He’d watch her do the "Chicken Dance” while she giggled along with her audience.

Carrie and Shane also kept a special cabinet with empty boxes for Zoe, who took after her super-organized mother and liked to arrange and rearrange its contents.

Most of all, Zoe’s parents will remember her smile and her love. Described as a "little angel” to her parents and grandparents, all her family said they can do now is take that literally.

"I just hope she’s looking down on us right now,” Carrie said, "and smiling and laughing. Because that’s what she’d be doing right now if she were still here.”