Authorities are investigating the tragic death of 4-year-old twins who were found unresponsive inside a toy chest in their Jacksonville, Florida, home.
“We are working with our partners at the Medical Examiner’s Office to determine the cause of death,” homicide Lt. Adam Blinn told TODAY.com in a statement. “At the time, we don’t know if this was an accident or foul play is involved.”
In a Facebook post published on Sept. 1, Sadie Myers said that her husband, Don Starr, put their four children to bed on the evening of Aug. 25, while she was at work.
“When I got home from work a couple hours later I looked in at all the kids like usual to make sure they were sleeping, then ate my dinner and went to sleep,” Myers wrote.
According to Myers, early the next morning the twins “decided they wanted to play in their room rather than sleep.” Myers said at some point, the girls “decided to snuggle up and go back to sleep” in their cedar toy chest. She noted that the twins like to sleep in “weird” places.
“Sometime during their sleep one of them must have moved or kicked during a dream and it caused the lid of this old wooden cedar chest to close,” Myers shared. “Something I did not know and I’m sure many others don’t know is that most wooden toy chests once closed are AIR TIGHT and also sound proof.”
“So as they slept, all snuggled up together, they slowly ran out of oxygen within a couple of hours and passed away,” she continued. “They never even knew it was happening. There wasn’t a sudden gasp for air, it was a very slow transition from sleep to passing on …”
Myers said in the morning, they couldn’t find the twins.
“So we ALL immediately started panicking, yelling for them, turning the house upside down, yelling up and down the street,” she wrote. Myers said eventually one of her sons located the twins.
“(He) yelled ‘Mommy I found them! They are so silly just sleeping in the toy box,’” Myers wrote. “I ran in to check and within a few seconds I knew something wasn’t right, but I also quickly realized it was too late … It makes no sense to me and never will.”
“I hope if you have a toy box like this that you destroy it immediately!!!” she added.
Myers said she and Starr are "struggling to make sense" of what happened.
"Not many will ever know the feeling of trying to not spend EVERY WAKING SECOND crying in agony, so hard that it makes you fall over in pain, but we are trying soooo hard to not let our boys see us this way," she wrote on Facebook.
Lt. Blinn told TODAY.com in a statement that when first responders arrived at the home, “life-saving efforts were performed but sadly both children were pronounced deceased.”
Blinn said there were adults and children in the home at the time of the incident and all are being interviewed.
According to a Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) report published in 2014, there were at least 34 child deaths between 1996 and 2014 involving toy chests.
“Lids on millions of storage chests and trunks can automatically latch shut, locking children inside and suffocating them,” CPSC warned. “In addition, the lid supports on older toy chests can fail to prevent the lid from closing suddenly, entrapping or strangling children by the head or neck.”
Myers’s sister, Deanna Myers, set up a GoFundMe for the family. On the page she described Myers and Starr as loving and selfless parents.
"They both worked full time jobs, one in the morning and one in the evening so they would never have to leave the children alone with a sitter,” Deanna wrote. “I know they were always exhausted but they were still able to be so present and so loving with each of their four children, every single day, no exceptions."
TODAY.com reached out to the family, who declined to comment further.