Two kids feared dead until now: The bodies of two children were recovered in North Carolina on Monday after a dirt wall collapsed, trapping them for several hours, it was reported.
The children, a 7-year-old boy and a 6-year-old girl, were playing around an excavated site on Sunday near the home of their grandparents near Charlotte. A dirt wall collapsed in on them and trapped the two below ground, according to NBC News.
Firefighters, police, and an engineer were deployed to help deal with the situation.
NBC reported that the father was with the two children when the wall collapsed and made the first 911 call for help.
“We’ve been working a horrific scene here,” Lincoln County Emergency Services spokesman Dion Burleson told reporters gathered near the rural site on a two-lane road dotted with modular and mobile homes.
Crews had been searching for the children since Sunday afternoon, when the boy’s father called 911 to report the collapse. Officials were on the scene within minutes but couldn’t get to the children.
The father had been digging with a backhoe on the site earlier in the day, said County Sheriff David Carpenter. He would not say what was being built or if the man was doing it alone or had professional help.
Burleson described the pit as 20 feet by 20 feet with a sloped entrance leading down to the 24-foot bottom. The children were at the bottom of the pit retrieving a child-sized pickaxe when the walls fell in on them, Carpenter said.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
