It was supposed to be a fun activity to cap off a holiday sleepover party.
On Dec. 27, a group of cousins headed to Mooney’s Bay, a neighbourhood in Ottawa, to go tobogganing.
Eleven-year-old Josée Abi Assal was giddy with anticipation. She had moved to the nation’s capital with her parents and two older siblings from Lebanon six months earlier and was enthralled by winter.
A few weeks earlier, the girl had danced outside after seeing her first snowfall, and now she was going sledding for the first time.
But the event ended in tragedy. Around 2:50 p.m. that day, paramedics responded to a tobogganing accident at the Mooney’s Bay hill. Josée was transported to the pediatric hospital CHEO, where she died from her injuries.
That day, Josée’s aunt worried about the amount of ice sloping down the centre of the hill, and asked the children to take a gentler path that curved in a wide “C” on the side facing the Rideau River.
According to the family, a cousin hopped on the front of the plastic toboggan. Josée’s brother Jules, 14, climbed on next, followed by Josée at the back, who clutched Jules’s waist.
Halfway down, the sled turned 180 degrees and continued backward on the grooved curve, hurtling toward a cluster of metal sign posts.
Josée’s mother, Marie-Lou El-Kada, says her daughter’s spine was severed in the impact with one of those posts.
Harrowing news
El-Kada was at a pharmacy getting her COVID-19 booster shot when she learned of her daughter’s accident.
She said that immediately after hitting the post, Josée told her brother she couldn’t feel her legs. According to El-Kada, Josée told Jules, “I don’t want to continue my life paralyzed,” and he hugged and held her until the ambulance came.
El-Kada said Josée also asked her sister to help her, “but her sister can’t help her — only kiss her.”
