Why did my little boy die?

Mum still waits for answer a year on

A HEARTBROKEN mother is still waiting for answers a year after the death of her strapping three-year-old boy.

Claire Smith found her son, Dallas, dead in bed at their Royton home on January 27, last year, the day after his third birthday.

Police initially suspected carbon monoxide poisoning, but tests have proved inconclusive and, 12 months on, Claire is still baffled why her son died.

Claire (34) said: “I just can’t understand it. He was such a healthy lad. He had never been to the doctor’s and was really fit. I just can’t get my head around how he could just die like that.”

A post mortem examination proved inconclusive, and police are still carrying out tests so the family are waiting for an inquest date.

She added: “It’s been an absolutely horrendous year. Every day when I wake up and for a split second I think I have two children and then I suddenly realise I haven’t and I re-live that horrible moment when I found him.”

Dallas normally shared a room with his six-year-old sister, Madison, but on the night he died she slept with her mum.

Claire said: “ Madison sleeps with me now and I can’t sleep through the night because I’m constantly checking that she’s still breathing.

“I just want Dallas all the time. He was my soulmate.

“He was very bright and articulate and was adamant that he wanted to be a police officer.

“He never once complained about anything and was a natural entertainer who always had a smile on his face.”

On the day that Dallas would have celebrated his fourth birthday, family members gathered at Claire’s Rochdale Road home and held a teddy bears’ birthday party in his memory.

She is considering marking his birthdays in the future with a sponsored walk to raise money for the Special Care Baby Unit at the Royal Oldham Hospital.

She said: “It has been very hard for Madison. She still thinks her brother’s going to come back.”

In the weeks leading up to Dallas’s death last year, Claire says that he was off his food and had a runny nose.

She now believes that Dallas may have suffered a seizure, possibly linked to his illness.

She said: “In some ways, having the inquest will make Dallas’s death seem even more final and if they find he did die because of carbon monoxide poisoning, I’ll always feel as though I put him in a death trap.

“But whatever happens at the inquest, it can’t get any worse. It’s still incredibly raw and even when you’re having an okay day, it only take one little thing, one reminder and it all comes flooding back.”