6-year-old girl from New Jersey dies in badminton racket accident while on vacation

A 6-year-old girl died this week from head trauma caused when she was hit by the shaft of a badminton racket during a family vacation in Maine, police said.

The girl, identified as Lucy Morgan of Stockholm, New Jersey, died Wednesday at Maine Medical Center in Portland from injuries sustained in the crash at noon on June 1 in Limerick, about 30 miles west of Portland, Maine State Police said.

According to police and her father’s statements, the siblings were playing badminton in the front garden of a lakeside cottage in Limerick when she was hit.

The father, Jesse Morgan, is pastor of worship and discipleship at Green Pond Bible Chapel in Newfoundland, New Jersey. He wrote about what happened to Lucy on a blog associated with the nondenominational institution.

He said the family had just eaten lunch and he and his wife were behind the cottage when they heard screams up front.

“Due to a freak accident involving a bat that broke on the downswing, a sharp piece penetrated Lucy’s skull while she was sitting on the sidelines, causing catastrophic injuries,” he wrote. “She was still breathing but unresponsive as I held her down and (her mother) Bethany cried out to God.”

State police said that “the aluminum shaft of a badminton racket had come loose from the wooden handle, causing the shaft to strike the girl in the head and pierce her skull.”

Lucy was taken to MaineHealth Maine Medical Center in Sanford and then flown by helicopter to Maine Medical Center in Portland, it was said.

Jesse Morgan wrote that Lucy was suffering from hypoxic-ischemic encephalopathy, a brain injury caused by a lack of oxygen that can result from traumatic injuries. On Wednesday, he said, it seemed clear she was not coming back.

“Given the initial trauma that had led to the global hypoxic brain injury she sustained and the severity of the swelling, it was almost certain that she had suffered brain death,” Morgan wrote.

She was pronounced dead that morning, he said.

It was not immediately clear whether the Maine Office of Chief Medical Examiner had performed an autopsy or planned one. Spokespeople there were working on a response to a request for information.

Morgan wrote about how deeply Lucy’s death shocked her mother and her three other children, a four-year-old boy, an eight-year-old girl and a ten-year-old boy.

“Shiloh immediately broke down,” the pastor wrote of the eight-year-old. “She and Lucy are best friends and the middle girls.”

The “misfortune” tested his faith, Morgan wrote.

“We were ready to go to war with all of you, raging against the darkness,” he said.

An outpouring of support, including visits from relatives and other church leaders and community members, gifts of food and flowers, and expressions of condolence from some of the tens of thousands of people who have read the pastor’s accounts, are reminders of God’s goodness, the pastor wrote.

“Like gold at the bottom of a deep, dark well, there was and is evidence of God’s grace in this tragedy. We just had to be willing to go to the depths to see it,” he said.

Green Pond Bible Chapel will hold a memorial service for Lucy on June 15.

“I want her story to be a story of hope,” Morgan told NBC News on Friday. “Even though the worst happened, it helped others.”